Films and Feelings

Concept Art by Lorna Cook      It has been thirty years since household pets everywhere started resenting Walt Disney Animation.   In the three decades since The Lion King popularized the ritual of hoisting the nearest small animal up to the heavens against its will, the film has cemented itself as a fixture not just within Disney animation, but pop culture as a whole. The internet has an ongoing culture war with Disney as the cradle of all evil, as seen with something like the bad-faith criticisms of The Disney Princess brand ( which I have already talked about ), but these conversations tend to skip out on The Lion King . There are some critiques about things like the coding of the hyena characters or the Kimba controversy, but I don't see these weaponized nearly as often, and I see them less as time goes on while the discourse around the movie itself marches on unimpeded. (We can speculate why movies like The Little Mermaid or Cinderella are subjected to more s...

     I actually had a conversation with a colleague some weeks ago about the movie, Rain Man , a thoughtful drama from thirty years ago that helped catapult widespread interest in the subject of autism and neurodivergence. We took a mutual delight in how the film opened doors and allowed for greater in-depth study for an underrepresented segment of the community ... while also acknowledging that, having now opened those very doors, it is easy to see where Rain Man 's representation couldn't help but distort and sensationalize the community it aimed to champion. And I now want to find this guy again and see what he has to say about Tony Goldwyn's new movie, Ezra .       The movie sees standup comedian and divorced dad, Max (Bobby Cannavale), at a crossroads with how to raise his autistic son, the titular Ezra (William Fitzgerald), with his ex-wife, Jenna (Rose Byrne). As Jenna pushes to give Ezra more specialized attention, like pulling him out of publ...