culture
Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, by Kliph Nesteroff, Abrams, 312 pages, $30 The first paragraph of the book jacket lays it out: "There is a common belief that we live in unprecedented times, that people are too sensitive today, that nobody objected to the actions of actors, comedians, and filmmakers in the past. Modern pundits would have us believe that Americans of a previous generation had tougher skin and seldom complained. But does this argument hold up to scrutiny?" There's a good point underneath the hyperbole. People tend to believe—and pundits, politicians, and ac...
Reason
Pixar's Inside Out, released in 2015, was a delightful—if tear-jerking—journey through the mind of a precocious 11-year-old girl named Riley and the five emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust) that attempted to pilot her subconscious through a disruptive cross-country move. The first Inside Out arrived on the precipice of a major change in how American culture treats mental health. While the first film's handling of Riley's slump into depression felt boundary pushing, its sequel comes at a time when the risks of talking too much about mental health are starting to be examined. In In...
Reason
If you have fringe political views and some stranger shows up to offer you help committing an act of terrorism or political violence, think twice. As Reason's C.J. Ciaramella wrote in 2022, that helpful stranger is probably working with the feds. Similarly, if you're out to have a rival or a lover murdered but don't want to do it yourself, you should probably be suspicious of anyone you meet who claims to be a professional hit man. The murder-for-hire contractor across the diner booth from you is probably an undercover cop. Hit men, at least as portrayed in movies and airport thrillers, don't ...
Reason
One way to understand the Bad Boys franchise is as a referendum on shifting cultural views of masculinity. The first two films, released in 1995 and 2003 respectively, followed the brash antics of two hard-charging Miami cops, Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith). Mike and Marcus are a classic cinematic odd couple: Marcus is sloppy, goofy, messy, harried, and married; Marcus is handsome, uptight, hard-charging, and very, very single. But they shared a certain bro-code—vulgar, violent, competitive, sex-obsessed, and constantly engaged in insult comedy, much of which had...
Reason
Tom Cruise might just be Hollywood's most analog movie star. He reportedly once grew irate when a crew member suggested that a dangerous stunt be performed by a digital double, yelling: "There is no digital Tom! Just Tom!" For last summer's Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, Cruise, who was 61 when the movie hit theaters, actually jumped a motorcycle off a ramp on top of a mountain, let the bike fall down into the canyon, and then parachuted down into the valley below. The complex sequence took a year to plan and shoot. It probably cost a lot of money. There were some computer effect...
Reason
The last time filmmaker George Miller dipped into the Mad Max universe, in 2015, he gave us Fury Road, a roaring, rumbling, rowdy epic of vehicular mayhem that wasn't just the best action movie of the 2010s but the best movie of that decade, period. Yes, there are other contenders, but no other picture released during that span matched Fury Road's combination of ambition, originality, exuberance, and thematic heft. There was a silent-film purity to its story, which was essentially just a chase scene extended and elaborated to feature length. And there was a frantic intensity to its cascading s...
Reason
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