Mandagslinker

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle Review
The film challenges Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s definition of class as "characterized by a coherent social and cultural existence; members of a class share a common life style, educational background, kinship networks, consumption patterns, work habits, beliefs." Rather, the conception of class Harold and Kumar more closely follows is John Frow’s model, "defined in each of the economic, the political, and the ideological spheres. [. . .]. The inclusion of gender, race, and ethnicity as an ‘ideological’ moment within the domain of production [. . .] indicate[s] the way in which ideological values attributed to gender, race, and ethnicity work to structure relationship of production."


Film Journalism course: articles by past students
"The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising." So wrote Pauline Kael, the late, celebrated film reviewer of the New Yorker. The following selection of articles is, we hope, a lively affirmation of her comments.

La Biennale di Venezia

Baudrillard in The Matrix: the Hyperreal, Hollywood, and a Case for Misused References
The Matrix gave both cultural theorists and movie enthusiasts an opportunity to investigate the film on a variety of academic grounds. Interestingly enough, this implication was brought up within the movie by two references to the work of French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. The first reference is situated towards the beginning of the movie, when Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) grabs the author’s book Simulacra and Simulation to retrieve some mind-altering substances hidden in it. The second is uttered by Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) when he shows Neo the “real world,” saying to him, “Welcome to … the desert of the real.” As a matter of fact, the 1997 script had Morpheus say to Neo, “As in Baudrillard’s vision, your whole life has been spent inside the map, not the territory. This is Chicago as it exists today … ‘The desert of the real.’”

Family Is Hell and So Is the World
There is a short scene in my film in which the literary debate is edited, where we see that reality is manipulated by TV to be more attractive to viewers; TV reproduces and transmits a vision of reality that is supposed to be more interesting to viewers, and I am glad I was able to point that out in the film. . . . Yes, absolutely, there is the problem of the terrorism of the mass media today. There is the dictatorship of the dumbing down of our societies.

The Best of Everything: A Joan Crawford Encyclopedia