Last weekend I returned to the movie theatre for the first time since the summer blockbuster season began. The film that beckoned me back as well as stirred me from my Six Feet Under stupor — I’m foolishly watching the entire depressing series in 2 months — was Solitary Man …

When I was in college, both undergraduate and graduate school, this is what I knew about the personal lives of my professors:

Many had cats; at least two had dogs.
One spent most of her summers in Italy researching the letters of a sixteenth- (or maybe seventeenth-) century Italian woman.
One smoked cigarettes, …

This morning, I came across two letters to the editor from the Pittsburgh: Post-Gazette, both of which concern one of my favorite stars/dancers/entertainers, Gene Kelly.
The first letter comes from an 81-year old man who wonders why the town of Pittsburgh, where Kelly was born and ran a dance studio with …

The aim of the Hollywood star autobiographer is twofold and tension-filled: she must break and preserve her star image. In other words, she should reveal, Ruth Amossy maintains, both “her intimate self” (i.e., juicy personal details) and “the dream factory manufactured object” (i.e., the stereotyped image that lures fans) (676). …

This week, my Introduction to Film students and I are considering scars (and wounds) in Hollywood film and what they mean for the characters who bear them. As you might imagine, the marks figure differently on men and women. For example, many Hollywood films, classic and contemporary, …

Live-tweeting academic conferences is a relatively new phenomenon; as a result, conference participants and coordinators are still working out the kinks, so to speak. For example, at this year’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference (SCMS), the absence of WiFi frustrated presenters and attendees who …