Recently I asked a young friend of mine what new films she had been watching during the strange and alienating Plague Year 2020. In a way I was both surprised and not surprised at all with her answer. “I haven’t seen many new movies. Little of what’s done today is of any interest to [...]
Until very recently, Hollywood’s Asian characters were pretty much limited to the odd doctor here or there, the ‘dragon lady’ love interest, beggars on the streets of South Asia, or, let’s not forget the holy grail: the ‘New York taxi driver with the most overly-exaggerated Indian accent you’ll ever hear’. But that slowly started [...]
Few filmmakers embodied so fully an innate understanding of human perspective like Edward Yang. With unsparing perspicacity, Yang’s small yet extraordinary body of work shrewdly observed figures navigating the fraught expanse of globalization, a paradigmatic shift Yang and his generation witnessed in their native Taiwan after decades of brutal repression under the ruling party. [...]
Arthur Jafa recalls his first artistically directive experience in a lecture with the Perez Museum of Art in Miami. One of bemusement yet bewildering, 2001: A Space Odyssey offered a young Jafa a sense of disjuncture I am sure was by all felt in an initial encountering of the Kubrick classic. This may seem [...]
I don’t know whether it’s because of my own queerness, my age (having been born in the early ‘90s to lefty parents), or something else entirely, but when I picture the 1980s and 1990s in my mind’s eye, the biggest associations that come to the fore are of conservative oppression, punk activism, and the [...]
