School is back in session. FilmFisher is a site for educators and students, and though few of our writers currently fit into either of these categories, this month we went for an academic theme and picked our favorite cinematic teachers. William Connor Devlin Drug addict Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) from Half Nelson (2006) Professor and werewolf…Read On
Earlier this year, FilmFisher ran a collaborative piece by Timothy Lawrence and Robert Brown, discussing the Marvel and Star Wars franchises. Now, they have joined forces again to analyze one of the most successful blockbuster trilogies of recent years…Read On
This is how college went for me: I thought I knew everything my first year, then one of my professors got fed up with my fat mouth and told me to stop talking in front of the whole class. I hardly said anything in my classes for the next two years because I was nervous people would judge me. In my senior year, another professor told me, “You aren’t your ideas,” which was an exhortation to be less afraid of what people thought of my contributions. Some of my ideas are indeed terrible, but that doesn’t mean I’m terrible…Read On
If something is on television, chances are it’s been done before. This is no less true of Mad Men. TV might not be the last or latest medium for human expression, but its ideas and artistry have filtered down from so many sources that hardly anything can be called “new.” For a show set in the 1960s, this is especially unavoidable. Creator Matthew Weiner’s encyclopedic knowledge of the decade extended well past the usual associations conjured up by popular historical fiction…Read On
How’s this for a youth group or team meeting icebreaker: If you could bring one action hero to life, in the belief that their existence in the real world would make it a better place, who would you choose? Actually, let’s make the question more challenging: If you could bring one action hero to life…Read On
Like “Meditations In An Emergency,” which I previously wrote about for this series, Mad Men’s sixth season episode “The Flood” revolves around the way its characters struggle to react to events that carry great import but seem distant from the reality of their lives. Here, the tragedy in question is the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the responses range from callous selfishness to outraged hysteria…Read On
