Parallel Cinema

Magic Mike XXL, the sequel to the widely popular film shedding light on the male entertainment industry, is a film that is geared towards heterosexual women and their viewing pleasure. The audience follows Mike, a male stripper-turned-furniture business owner, as he reunites with his former stripper buddies and travels to Myrtle Beach for a final appearance at a male stripper convention. Delving into the themes of the sexualization of the male body and fulfillment of female pleasure, Magic Mike…

thief. I've loved the city my whole life - to me, it's like a great woman.” From one of his earliest films, Bananas (1971) all the way to his latest work, Café Society (2016), Woody Allen has always treated New York as a principal character in his cinema. His Manhattan is an extension of his human characters’ personalities, or vice versa: his protagonists are Manhattan personified. The rapid-fire one-liners, agonized relationships and vintage jazz music in Allen’s movies…

In a scene from the 2006 Peruvian film Madeinusa, Don Cayo—mayor of the fictional Andean town of Manayaycuna, breaks a clay pot full of food on the ground, as a gesture that signals the beginning of tiempo santo. As they file out of church after mass, the people of the town prepare to celebrate a period that starts at 3pm on Good Friday—the time of Jesus’ crucifixion—and ends at 6am on Easter Sunday, the time of his resurrection. According to local custom, during this period there is no sin:…

Ryland Ficzel Lori Walker ACAD 100 24 January 2016 Reading Response for There Is No Terrorist Conspiracy On any given day with a click of the remote control, we are bombarded with globalization, seemingly never ending conflicts of economic warfare and the reintroduced boogyman for adults that is known as terrorism. Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom John Major shares his thoughts in There Is No Terrorist Conspiracy on how to combat terrorism, and states the case that terrorism itself…

Video games are a notably rising form of experience and pedagogy making headway into the traditional boundaries of classroom curriculums and technical work trainings. Video games open realms to explore where players may engage in experience taking by living vicariously through their avatars; in the process, they learn through their interactions and experiences taken place in the virtual worlds explored. Video games are advantageous to adopt into educational curriculums and work settings, seeing…

As exemplary pieces of off-centered queer cinema in contemporary Mainland China, the 1996 film East Palace, West Palace by Zhang Yuan and the 2009 film Spring Fever by Lou Ye denote two distinctive paradigms of artistic approaches in tackling the tension between homosexuality and heterosexuality: the former one is to emphasize power contradictions between the peripheral queer and the dominant straight to constitute the groundbreaking subversion of power relationships traditionally dictated by…

and religious diversity. This novel is not quiet satire implies a clear object an author wishes to mock or demystify. And there are some satirical objects in some of Transmission’s subplots especially relating to multinational corporations and Hindi cinema; the same cannot be said for the novel’s protagonist, an alienated software programmer named Arjun Mehta. He finds his way from a second rate technical university in India to an exploitative ‘body shop’ working arrangement in the Bay Area and…

This paper looks at how Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Andre Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) make art cinema out of the popular genre of science fiction. Of particular interest is the representation of extraterrestrial space and how it is used to explore key concerns of science fiction, including the relation of humans to technology, humans to aliens, and the present to the future. This paper focuses on the different ways that Kubrick and Tarkovsky construct environments to shape…

Mattingly, in ‘Imperium to Imperialism’, undertakes the task of evaluating the Roman Empire in a modern perspective, with focus on the Roman brutality in undertaking its conquests and then its role as occupier, drawing parallels with 19th century empires such as the French or the British Empires, and the American ‘aircraft carrier empire’ of the late 20th-21st century. He does this by illustrating that the contemporary empires looked to Rome for inspiration, which they did, as evidenced by the…

With reference to two films, analyse the relationship between Expressionist Art and Film. In what ways can German Expressionist cinema be considered a graphic art? Lyonel Feininger, Street Lantern (1918) Otto Dix, Streetcar (1920) Fashioning ‘artificial worlds of light and shadow’ expressionist film, during the early twentieth century, and its stark contrast to the prosaic Hollywood films of the period gave the audience a relatively new visual and sensory experience by ‘creat[ing] a…