The 2018 incident when a Black student was racially profiled by a campus police officer for eating her lunch in the living room of a residence hall and told that she “seems to be out of place.” Incredibly, Shaw seems to see herself as the victim in this situation, and not the Black student who was humiliated and…

Nobody is even saying it’s a bad film, just that one aspect of it, even when it was made, was considered deeply reductive at best, to the point where even the filmmakers apologized for how poorly they handled it. 

Please tell me when that was - or was that when only one identity really 'mattered'?

Some of you need to realize that sometimes you can just shut up and respect someone’s opinion, especially if they are much closer to the experience. I might have quibbles with this and I might love Silence to death, but maybe respect a trans person’s views on trans issues and just shut up.

I don’t know, I think “I refuse to listen to a trans person telling me about their experience of this depiction of transness” is pretty representative of this awful year as well.

He’s exploiting a number of vicious trans stereotypes which are harmful no matter how many throw away lines about “not really trans” you throw in. It’s like having a killer with every terrible jewish stereotype you can think of, and thinking a quick, “oh they’re not really jewish” will solve the problem. It doesn’t,…

Just because The Maltese Falcon is an old famous movie doesn’t mean it’s not above critique. It also wouldn’t be even close to the only classic 40's film that’s homophobic. There’ve been entire books written about this sort of thing; you’re a couple of decades behind the discussion if you think you’re dropping a…

Gee, I wonder why someone whose life was made hell in association with this film might remember things differently than someone who only cares (if at all) as a casual observer? You’re arguing that the author here can’t rationally interpret their own life experiences as well as you can, or worse, that they “must” be…

putting it as pithily as possible: does the OP have a point that giving lip-music that BB was not gay or trans was just a weaksauce excuse to indulge in harmful myths and misconceptions? Like “this villain happens to eat the blood of christian babies, lend money at usorious rates, and have a hooked nose, but we…

I think one of the really insightful things about this article is how it points out the contradiction at the heart of the movie. It isn’t “about” the character’s gender identity or sexuality, yet it harps relentlessly on those things.

I love the idea that the early 1990s are such a distant era that we can’t apply “modern” standards to movies from that era.

generational warfare is dumb as fuck.

First off - regardless of intent, yeah, the film has had that impact and Demme has admitted such (again, much as he had hoped otherwise.)
How an individual reads it at this point is, unfortunately, kind of secondary to how we as a society read it and what we did with that reading.
Second - that transformative idea is a…

“I really loathe the trend of attempting to read modern political morality into older movies.”

I think that’s bit rough. It’s an opinion piece by someone who’s life was directly and negatively affected by this film.

And, while I probably shouldn’t bring JK Rowling into it, she trades in the same cliche in her new book--and acts like it’s a clever twist, to boot.

Harris is merely the most well known of a whole stable of crime/thriller writers of the era (that stretched back at least to the late 60's and early 70's and the first well known openly trans folks (Renee Richards, Wendy Carlos, et al, and even earlier than that) that used any alternate sexuality as a exotic…

Fantastic write up.  Looking at the film now... yeah its hard to miss the very clear transphobia.  Its not great.  One thing to point out, Gumb is indeed based on a couple real serial killers.  Mostly Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, and Ed Kemper.  One important fact.  None of them were trans.  Ed Gein had a lot of sexual…

I didn’t care for the increasingly dark palettes.  I like the Hallows movies, but they looked like Private Ryan.

I love the Harry Potter movies. They’re one of the few things from my childhood that I have a modicum of nostalgia for—which I haven’t been able to say for the books for many years. I can’t defend the first movie as good—although, I will go to the bat for Chamber of Secrets, which is good and people will figure out.…