As another school year comes to an end, another cohort of students must take stock of their relationship to “the real world.” This is experienced differently for different groups, of course.
The last week of April is, for those in the know, Shakespeare Week: the week when the Bard of Avon was baptized (on April 26, 1564) and died (on April 23, 1616). To my mind, no film released this Shakespeare Week does more to honor his legacy than Justin Lin’s “Fast Five,” the fourth sequel to 2001’s “The Fast and the Furious” and the latest since 2009’s “Fast & Furious.”
Earth Day has passed once again (let’s hope you planted a tree and picked up some litter this Saturday), but that’s no reason for us to get lax on our personal ecology. Saving the Earth is easy, after all. As a species we may be living at the edge of a precipice, but — if the “Go Green!” boosters are to be believed — there are simple things we can each do every day to avoid a cataclysm.
There’s something almost poetic about seeing the first installment of a proposed trilogy of films based on Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged,” in...
There’s a broad strain of American political discourse that considers race a myth, an illusion that, if we work diligently to expose as false, will wither away into the dustbin of history. A greater and more pernicious one is the old myth of social progress; that racism is a musty old problem that, as time passes, becomes less and less of a vital issue.
How do you get over the old dictum that being honest means telling the truth? As a culture, Americans have a troubled relationship with honesty, with very crude notions about how a person “is” honest or acts honestly. On one hand, we expect narrative films to portray human interactions honestly — we’re begging to be conned by the films we watch. On the other hand, we have silly ideas about how our actions define us; an actor “is” gay in a film, but “is” straight in “real life” — we like to feel like we’re in charge while we’re being conned.
Even the most cynical observer might have been surprised by the Orange County District Attorney’s decision to press charges against the 19 students and workers who, directly or indirectly, participated in the Feb. 24, 2010 sit-in on the fifth floor of Aldrich Hall. This might only be because the district attorney’s office decided to inform the students of the charges through an online press release, publishing each student’s full name and location (forever linking each of them, via Google, to a criminal case) on the Thursday of finals week, with an arraignment scheduled during Winter Break, and a full six months after UC Irvine itself completed disciplinary proceedings against the students involved.
