Films and Feelings

     Maybe it was self-control that compelled Spielberg to build his whole movie around aliens but give the aliens themselves as little screentime as possible. (Or, for all I know, he did it on a dare.)  But this is only one of the risks taken by his latest film.       This first encounter picture is distanced from something like Independence Day and more toward something like 2001: A Space Odyssey --and it's even closer to something like Arrival . The film sees a cyber-security worker, Daniel Kilner (Josh O'Connor) who defects with the intent to reveal what he knows to the world: the government has had repeated, secret encounters with extraterrestrial life. He has a team of underground sympathizers, lead by Hugo Wakefield (Colmon Domingo), but he also has agent Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) out to stop the truth at any cost. Kilner's only chance getting the truth out there is in joining up with Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a newscast personali...

            I have very little context for anything He-Man. But that shouldn't count against Mattel's new Masters of the Universe film. I had very little context for the first "Thor" movie, and even less for Guardians of the Galaxy . But those faced no trouble becoming, and remaining, major pillars of pop culture for me.       With Masters of the Universe , there are pieces here that are vaguely (and occasionally not-so-vaguely) reminiscent of both of these properties. But these are surface connections. In the short time since those movies entered the arena, Hollywood has already forgotten why we even fell in love with these epic adventures in the first place.      Adam is the crown prince of the mythical Eternia, a universe that was razed by the evil Skeletor the same day the king and queen sent Adam off to earth to protect him from Skeletor's rage. In the fifteen years since, Adam has thought of nothing else (and a...

      I haven't historically considered myself a "Star Wars" kid. And to be clear, I take no pride in saying that or anything. I respect the property and what it's given to pop culture.      But I do feel like it's worth mentioning in this review that I didn't really go into Jon Favreu's The Mandalorian and Grogu thinking I had much of what I'd call nostalgia for this movie to exploit.       And yet watching this movie, I found myself hearkening back to the things about Star Wars that caught my attention as a kid. For me, that was the gladiator-style match in "Attack of the Clones." This film offers quite a few roller-coasters along those lines. And as far as the creature designs go for the monsters in these arenas, they were quite good. I wasn't trying too hard to anticipate which were computer-generated and which were puppeted, but the aesthetics of both the Jim Henson era and the Spielberg era sat very well here in this vessel....

Lynn Hunt, American Historical Association, University of California 2002, is best known for her 2007 work Inventing Human Rights , a cornerstone for academic work on the history of human interaction. This landmark work tracked the developing concept of human empathy across European history, especially the function that art and literature played in allowing humans to recognize the interiority and dignity of other humans who were different from them. But in 2002, she shared in the May Issue of Perspectives on History her observations in “presentism,” and the uphill battle of even getting students to engage with history at all, Gladiator (2000) “Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forebears constantly fail to measure up to our ...