Films and Feelings

      A question I've heard thrown out during a time as contentious as 2025 America (or anywhere, really) is some variation of, "What good are movies during a time like this?" And there are a lot of answers to that.  Cinderella (2015)     Many will quickly point to film as a means of escapism, letting the masses come up for air when things get just a little too crazy. I'm the last person to frown on that. If we hope to attain anything like happiness, we might as well rehearse what it looks like on the other side of the screen.      But the deeper I immerse myself into film and the culture that springs around it, the more secure I become in the idea that film can also have direct application to understanding the state of the union--helping us understand how it is the world came to be so volatile in the first place.  13th (2016)     There are certainly works of media (documentaries, mostly) tracking the development of real-worl...

            So … yeah, this is obviously an exaggeration. The thing we’d call toxic masculinity is, regrettably, still with us, like a fart that just won’t terminate. It is in the workplace. It is in elected positions of power in the United States and across the world. It is behind closed doors. It is out in the open. In the wake of certain recent events, some voices have expressed some opinion about whether the fight against toxic masculinity has died and whether we’d best just hang up our boots and return to our trash piles. I think such attitudes are certainly understandable, but not at all helpful. The attitudes that feed the parts of masculinity we might call toxic have been reinforced for centuries. Any such campaign to clean out that mess was going to have to persist for far longer than the life cycle of any one hashtag. The good news is that history shows us we are maybe a little further into this fight than we thought. And in our effort to und...