In Unhomed: Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Pamela Roberston Wojcik examines America's ambivalent and shifting attitude toward homelessness. She considers film cycles from five distinct historical moments that show characters who are unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than fixed—characters who fail, resist, or opt out of the mandate for a home of one's own. From the tramp films of the silent era to the 2021 Oscar-winning...

Albert Brooks: Interviews (UP of Mississippi, 2024) brings together fourteen profiles of and conversations with Brooks (b. 1947), in which he contemplates, expounds upon, and hilariously jokes about the connections between his show business upbringing, an ambivalence about the film industry, the nature of fame and success, and the meaning and purpose of comedy. Throughout all these encounters, Brooks expresses an unwavering commitment to his own artistic expression as a filmmaker and a...

“I envy normal women—they’re free,” laments Irina Dubrovna Reed, in Jacques Tourner’s 1942 film, one as noir as Out of the Past which he would direct five years later. Join Mike and Dan for a conversation about a film that explores the same subject as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and has received, justly or not, “The Criterion Treatment.” They also talk about why Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake works on paper but not on the screen. So grab your sketchbook, steal that key, and give it a listen! You can...

In the summer of 2016, Disney introduced its first Latina princess, Elena of Avalor. Elena, Princess of the Periphery: Disney’s Flexible Latina Girl (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Diana Leon-Boys explores this Disney property using multiple case studies to understand its approach to girlhood and Latinidad. Following the circuit of culture model, Dr. Leon-Boys teases out moments of complex negotiations by Disney, producers, and audiences as they navigate Elena’s circulation. Case...

Before Salma Hayek, Eva Longoria, and Penelope Cruz, there was Lupe Velez―one of the first Latin-American stars to sweep past the xenophobia of old Hollywood and pave the way for future icons from around the world. Her career began in the silent era, when her beauty was enough to make it onto the silver screen, but with the rise of talkies, Velez could no longer hope to hide her Mexican accent. Yet Velez proved to be a talented dramatic and comedic actress (and singer) and was much more...

Contemporary Chinese film and literature often draw on time-honored fantastical texts and tales which were founded in the milieu of patriarchy, parental authority, heteronormativity, nationalism, and anthropocentrism. Cathy Yue Wang's Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist Adaptations of Traditional Tales in Chinese Fantasy (Wayne State University Press, 2023) examines the processes by which modern authors and filmmakers reshape these traditional tales to develop new narratives that...

Everyone loves gut-busting belly-laughs in a film. But sometimes, big laughs slow things down. There’s something to be said for films that amuse us for their duration. Join us for a conversation about a film that makes us smile from its first moment to its last: The Ladykillers, Alexander Mackendrick’s 1955 dark comedy starring Alec Guinness as the creepiest criminal and a young Peter Sellars as one of his gang. Dan praises the film’s economy and compares it to John Cheever’s “Reunion”; Mike...

From the theatre mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long performed as an instrument for the protection and concealment of identity. Even as they conceal and protect, masks – as faces – are an extension of the self. At the same time, they are a part of material culture: what are masks made of? What traces do they leave behind? Acknowledging that that mask-wearing has become increasingly weaponized and politicised,...

Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital (Amsterdam UP, 2023) is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, and the National Fairground and Circus...

In 1965, Bob Dylan teased the squares by stating, “Something is happening but you don’t know what it is.” The same could be said for childhood and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is a film that takes childhood seriously—as opposed to the way it is usually portrayed in big-budget, effects-laden films. Join us for a conversation about a film sometimes compared to the work of C. S. Lewis but one we find is more like that work of Miguel de Cervantes and Hayao Miyazaki. If you’re interested in learning...

Within the social sciences and the humanities, international research in Burma/Myanmar studies tends to lean toward political science and Buddhist studies, or what can be characterized as the “soldiers or monks” approach. The political situation within the country has restricted the access that foreign researchers have had to the country. It has also shaped the type of research that international scholars choose to research and that grant agencies are willing to fund. As a result of this our...

The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic (Grove Atlantic, 2024) tells the story of the epic friendship between John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the golden era of improv, and the making of a comedic film classic that helped shape our popular culture. “They’re not going to catch us,” Dan Aykroyd, as Elwood Blues, tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi. “We’re on a mission from God.” So opens the musical action comedy The Blues...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we discuss Netflix’s new screen adaptation of Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy. We discuss the battle between the eye and the idea in film and television science fiction, and whether the new show strikes a successful balance. We consider some of the challenges involved in adapting this distinctively Chinese literary work for a non-Chinese audience, and what might have been lost in doing so. And we think more broadly about the...

Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy? In Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has...

If we could undergo a procedure that would erase the painful memories from our lives, would we do it? That seems to be the question of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) until we realize that we’re asking the wrong question. The real question this film asks is why wouldn’t such a procedure ever work? Join us for a conversation about Michel Gondry’s mind-bending film that is a completely different experience when you’re 20 versus when you’re 40. Go ahead and give it a listen–then...

In Music and Sound in the Films of Dennis Hopper (Routledge,2024), Stephen Lee Naish explores how as a director Dennis Hopper used music and sound to propel the narrative of his work and to signpost the era in which the films were made and the characters' place within American culture. Naish examines five of Hopper's films to show how this deep engagement with music to build character and setting continued throughout his career, as Hopper used folk, punk, hip-hop, and jazz to shape the worlds...

We are supposed to get smarter as we get older. Do we? If the meaning of your life had to be found in nine representative days, which days would you choose? Are they the same days that your critics would select? Would you live your life differently if you had to watch yourself years later a big screen? Would you think you were as cool as you do now if you had to see yourself as a cold observer does? Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks’s version of A Matter of Life and Death, asks all of these...

What is the status of art and culture in a world dominated by apps, algorithms, and influencers? Anna Kornbluh’s newest book Immediacy, Or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2023) analyzes a swath of cultural forms from auto-fiction to Netflix binges and immersive art installations. For Kornbluh, neoliberalism’s economic disintermediation manifests itself in a new dominant cultural style that renounces complex forms of representation, abstraction, and mediation in favor of...

Why does race matter in film and TV? In Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber and Faber, 2024), Ellen E. Jones, a journalist, broadcaster and the co-host of the BBC’s Screenshot, shows how the storytelling potential offered by screen media shape how we understand ourselves and our societies. The book covers a huge range of genres in film and TV, from superheroes and horror, through romance and crime, to costume drama, comedy and westerns. It tells the history...

The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it holds together a multitude of media and shapes the way they are accessed, organised, created, consumed, and manipulated. However, it does not do so without leaving viscous traces, and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nick Jones examines this residue and its consequences,...

Long before internet archives and the anytime, anywhere convenience of streaming, people collected, traded, and shared radio and television content via informal networks that crisscrossed transnational boundaries. Eleanor Patterson’s fascinating cultural history explores the distribution of radio and TV tapes from the 1960s through the 1980s. Looking at bootlegging against the backdrop of mass media’s formative years, Patterson delves into some of the major subcultures of the era. Old-time...

Magic is misdirection, and Richard Attenborough and William Goldman do a terrific job of misdirecting the audience in this 1978 thriller. Like The King of Comedy and Limelight, the film looks at the desperation of people who want to be recognized; unlike those films, there’s nothing funny about the hero’s struggle. Join us for a conversation about a film so unsettling that even the TV spot (featured at the start of the episode) caused people to run from their living rooms. So put down the...

Part Two of director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films embeds viewers among the Fremen, the Indigenous inhabitants of the planet Arrakis. The sole source of the valuable drug spice, Arrakis has been colonized and its resources extracted by the Imperium. The Fremen fight to liberate themselves and their planet from Imperial control under the messianic leadership of Paul Atreides. In Frank Herbert’s original series of Dune novels, the Fremen were inspired by the Bedouin, nomadic pastoralist...

Baby Face is the 1933 film that created the archetypal Barbara Stanwyck character and famously laid everything bare before the production code tried to clean up Hollywood. It’s direct and “against interpretation”—but that’s what makes it so compelling. Join Tim and Dan for a conversation about how the film speaks to our current moment regarding agency, exploitation, and climbing the corporate ladder. It’s also a lot like Richard III. This may have been the first of Barbara Stanwyck’s big...

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance (U Texas Press, 2024) investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive...