Every Girl Should Read Virginia Woolf
“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own Reading Virginia Woolf is a journey. For me, it started with To the Lighthouse in college. I fell in love with the novel’s beautiful language and the way she conveys the passage of time through […]
Mama Mia and That Summer Time Feeling
Back in June, a friend and I went to see the traveling show for Mama Mia! in Boston. The scene on the Boston Common was even more chaotic than usual so my friend dropped me off on the sidewalk to run ahead to the theater while she looked for parking. True to my nature, I […]
Disaster Flicks
It all began when I was fourteen and my Dad took me to see The Day After Tomorrow on the big screen. On the ride home from the theater we bonded over picking apart the obvious Hollywood tropes in this massive blockbuster about an ice age hitting Manhattan. After all, The Day After Tomorrow is […]
Our Place in History
I’m writing from the birthplace of the American Revolution. Looking out at the North Bridge in Minute Men National Park, I wonder, did they know when they fired the “shot heard round the world” what was to come? What our country would come to be? All my life I’ve lived under the assumption that American […]
Disney Live Action Remakes: Princesses and Villains
From The Jungle Book to Alice in Wonderland, and now Beauty and the Beast, Disney has entered a new era of production, focusing on excavating from its vaults the animated masterpieces of the past, and transforming them into modernized and socially relevant live action spectacles. With the aid of new computer animation technology and more […]
A Man Called Ove: Book vs. Movie
*Spoiler Alert We all know that person, the grumpy old crank who seems to derive his main enjoyment in life from stirring up trouble with everyone he meets. He harasses you for minor offenses like texting too frequently or playing music too loudly. But did you ever stop to think how he ended up this way? Or how one […]
Moonlight, Lemonade, and Experimental Filmmaking
And the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture is… La La Land. As I heard this announcement, I was struck by a profound disappointment. Then, an astonishing thing happened, the wrong name had been called and Moonlight was announced as the real winner. Giving awards is a subjective process and La La Land […]
Something Rotten: Broadway’s Joke on Itself
Something Rotten! is a play based around the genius of others – a fact that it acknowledges out right. As a farce about the concept of creative geniuses, it satirizes William Shakespeare’s writing process for his great masterpiece, Hamlet. While the play draws some inspiration from Shakespeare (particularly in its bawdy humor), it also places […]
The Expanding Harry Potter Universe
The Harry Potter books are classics in the making, but with the meteoric rise of their popularity they have also proven to be a commercial gold mine. Movies, theme parks, websites, and fan fiction have turned the beloved book series in to a cultural phenomenon. At the center of this phenomenon is J.K. Rowling, the […]
The Crown: Assassins
*Spoiler Alert* Netflix’s new original series The Crown deals with the complexities of public life. For many heads of state, individual desires invariably give way to civic duties, as they attempt to build a stable public persona. But what happens when a queen or a prime minister’s personal life begins to eclipse the public persona […]