My first trip to the Rubin Museum was with a group of acerbically-minded third graders. I immediately felt comforted in the quiet, deep-gray and gilded red space. The low chanting in the galleries and the soft faces of many Buddhas struck me as a warm greeting: kind and impersonal. The kids gravitated almost immediately to … Continue reading Rubin Museum // Reflection
'The Act of Killing' The way viewers react to Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary 'The Act of Killing' comes down to the way each viewer is able to expand their notion of the act of killing. In the liberal, privileged and mono-cultured West, we vaguely, yet virulently, understand murder (especially mass murder) as an unforgivable crime. Abstractly, … Continue reading Documentary: Framing Cultural Violence in ‘The Act of Killing’
The first time I saw “The Help,” I had a sticky feeling I would see it again, not because I was dying to or needed to clarify some big mystery in the plot, but because while the movie was very well done and quite important to film history, something was, shall we say, not sticking … Continue reading ‘The Help’ Cast Shed Light on New Film
