by Coeli Carr | Dec 26, 2013
Based on the true story of crooked broker Jordan Belfort, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a three-hour evocation of the revelry-filled Roman festival known as the Saturnalia. At some point during that ancient manic carnival, the head reveler was put to... 
by Coeli Carr | Nov 26, 2013
The opening scene of Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom centers on a young male black child, gleefully racing through field in rural South Africa. No barriers lay in the boy’s path. Fast forward to Johannesburg in 1942 and the movie’s initial image, heralding a boundless... 
by Coeli Carr | Nov 22, 2013
The Hunger Games franchise likes to quantify. Twelve subjugated districts of the fractured country called Panem paying obeisance to the Capitol. Seventy-four (and counting) annual fight-to-the-death competitions, each one involving the forced participation, to the... 
by Coeli Carr | Nov 1, 2013
When we first set eyes on Ron Woodroof during the opening moments of Dallas Buyers Club, a film directed by Jean-Marc Vallée that was inspired by Woodroof’s true story, he’s immediately recognizable as a freedom-loving and non-mainstream figure who’s Uranian to the... 
by Coeli Carr | Oct 18, 2013
When slavery is the subject of a film or other media, the assumption is black men and women have been held captive by a master and that freedom is an imagined, longed-for taste which they may never experience. In Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, there’s an ugly... 
by Coeli Carr | Sep 19, 2013
Do you remember the prophetic scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which Dr. Marcus Brody tells Indiana Jones not to mess with the Ark of the Covenant? Jones saw no reason to respect spiritual order or the Ark’s energy to take care of itself, and he paid dearly. A... 