Family films appear to be getting edgier, and for good reason: those that push the envelope in terms of content tend to do better both critically and commercially. That’s the conclusion of a research team led by psychologist Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis. It’s a follow-up to a 2009 paper that looked at films in general, and concluded that while violence tends to boost box office performance, sex and nudity do not. The equation is significantly different for family-oriented fare, the researchers write in the journal Empirical Studies of the Arts. Within ... Read More
Katniss Everdeen: Heroine. Warrior. Math Tutor.
August 28, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The best-selling novel and top-grossing film The Hunger Games has been called an exciting thriller, a metaphor for our get-ahead-at-all-costs society, and disturbing look at a dark future. Now we can add: It’s also an effective way to teach kids some of the fundamentals of mathematics. At least, that’s the argument made by Michael A. Lewis of Hunter College. Writing in the splendidly named Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (is there any other kind?), he describes himself as “a quantitative social worker/sociologist who teaches, among other things, statistics.” A few months back, ... Read More
Batman Shootings Explained – by Everyone
July 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Deborah Blum of the Knight Science Journalism Tracker has a great roundup of answers to the question: “Why would someone, anyone, buy four semi-automatic weapons and 6,000 rounds of ammunition for the single-minded purpose of harming people he did not know?” She links to a fistful of well-researched articles making it clear that most of our presumptions about mass killers from Columbine on are wrong, or at least drastically oversimplified. We may never know what actually motivates someone to slaughter a bunch of strangers, but we do know what makes it easy for them to do it: ... Read More
Prometheus Adviser Kevin Hand: Aliens’ Advance Man
June 8, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
IT’S A SUNNY SPRING DAY at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory outside Los Angeles when I show up at Kevin Hand’s office to talk about his work with Ridley Scott on the new film, Prometheus, a sort-of prequel to the Alien series. But it seems only polite to ask first about the trip Hand has just returned from: a quick expedition to the middle of the Pacific Ocean with another star director, James Cameron, who was taking a custom-made submarine on a historic dive to the deepest point on Earth. Cameron spent three hours at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 33,000 feet below the sea, the ... Read More
Documentary Frames Graphic Art’s Political Ferment
March 2, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Back in the day, being a socially committed graphic artist was a particularly dangerous undertaking. Honoré Daumier was imprisoned for his work, and died impoverished. Käthe Kollwitz and Otto Dix had their work declared “degenerate” by the Nazis. George Grosz was arrested for allegedly insulting the German army. And so incendiary were Francisco Goya’s masterpieces, Disasters of War, the aquatint prints were not published until 35 years after his death. “In the past, the documentation of these artists had a terrific effect, which was why back then it was more dangerous to do ... Read More
Lebowski Fest Continues Online
August 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
You know how it goes. You had every intention of attending the New York Lebowski Fest, which concluded last night with a panel discussion featuring the cast of the cult classic The Big Lebowski. The Coen Brothers’ comedy makes you laugh like few other movies, and it continues to reveal new layers with each successive viewing. But life got in the way, man. You couldn’t quite get it together to make the trip. Nothing to do but head to the bowling alley — or, better yet, drown your sorrows in a white Russian. Well, here’s a third option: Check out Miller-McCune’s recent roundup of ... Read More
Scholars and The Big Lebowski: Deconstructing The Dude
July 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A bowling alley. A severed toe sporting a neatly polished nail. An aging hippie and his best friend, a Vietnam War veteran with a hair-trigger temper. If those images don't add up to anything for you, feel free to flip the page. If they do, it means you're familiar — perhaps intimately so — with one of the most analyzed, deconstructed and eclectically interpreted films of recent decades: The Big Lebowski. Joel and Ethan Coen's subversive comedy, in which a slovenly slacker (Jeff Bridges) in modern-day L.A. gets caught up in a convoluted kidnapping case, was neither a critical nor a ... Read More
Why Whites Avoid Movies With Black Actors
May 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In terms of box-office grosses, this is an extraordinary week for Hollywood: The No. 1 movie in America features a mixed-race cast. Granted, that movie is Fast Five, the fifth installment of the Fast and Furious action series. Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris called these films “loud, ludicrous and visually incoherent,” but added that they are “the most progressive force in Hollywood today.” As Morris noted, nonwhite actors played major roles in only two of the 30 top-grossing films of 2010. Studio executives believe white audiences prefer to see white characters, while ... Read More
Tracking Invasive Species from Riverside to Pandora
October 4, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
While you may have been distracted by the whir of Navi flyers or distraught by a translucent plotline or even nauseated by your 3-D glasses, chances are if you saw James Cameron's Avatar last year, you spent very little time focused on its plant life. Yet there is one unnamed Pandora player whose contributions, touted recently by the theatrical run of Avatar's special edition release, whose entire 15 minutes of Hollywood acclaim came because of those fronds. A professor of plant physiology and former chair of the department of botany and plant sciences at the University of California, ... Read More
