THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Every time I've taught my Contemporary Film class, I've found at least one or two students who don't seem to grasp and/or enjoy the exploration of implicit meaning in films. The idea that symbolism and latent content percolates beneath the veneer of narrative (or, in some cases, is the narrative) just sits wrong to those folks for some reason; I can even remember a student from many years ago in a class I taught on Stanley Kubrick asking me why films had to mean anything.  (He plagiarized a final project and failed the course.) I was reminded of that student after reading about the upcoming film Room 237 , a documentary covering some rather interesting interpretations of the meanings potentially contained within The Shining .  In general, film criticism over the decades has shifted from a more modernistic and canonical approach -- one of objective content knowingly delivered by the filmmaker with full intent and purpose -- to the more recent postmodernist perspective, whi...

The Psychology of Music infographic

I appear to be one of the only humans in the universe who doesn't currently strive to alter her/his consciousness through psychoactive drugs.  I certainly understand some of the motivations behind it -- life is short, the relationships between the humans are thorny and rife with conflict, the world is baking so why shouldn't I get baked too?, and all that -- but personally, I didn't really linger on those paths for long.  My psychoactive drug experiences, limited as they were, stayed confined to alcohol and marijuana.  And from my times at road-end bonfires and too-loud bars and after-parties and back-stage events, the majority of violence and aggression I saw was from those folks high on booze rather than those high on pot, so if we as a society wish to curb violence and aggression, we need to take a hard, evidence-based look at reducing alcohol consumption. I've been reading a book entitled " Drugs Without The Hot Air " from a British professor called Davi...