Recent Movies Research Articles

Real-world exoskeletons are better than those in the movie Atlas.

The recent movie Atlas misses fundamental robotics advances in self-stabilization and human-robot interaction.

A RYÛSUKE HAMAGUCHI MOVIE: ‘WALDEN'

<p>Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (1978) is one of the most important directors of contemporary cinema. He has won many awards with his films at the world's major film festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, and Venice and he received the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2022 with his movie <em>‘Drive My Car’</em>. Hamaguchi’s <em>‘Walden’</em> (2022) is one of Hamaguchi's recent movies. <em>‘Walden’</em> is a co-production of Austria, and Japan, premiered at The Festival Viennale (2022). Within Hamaguchi’s relatively mainstream cinema poetics, the movie <em>‘Walden’</em> is an experimental work that invites the spectator to a deep contemplation. The film is a 2-minute, almost monochrome record of a water surface with reflections of trees, raindrops, vibration waves, water rings, bird songs, swarming insects, several sounds of nature, a floating leaf, etc. In addition to the sounds of nature, the film includes a female voice excerpt with music from Douglas Sirk's <em>‘All That Heaven Allows’</em> (1955). Jean Wyman who is the protagonist “Cary Scott” of <em>‘All That Heaven Allows’</em>, reads some lines from Henry David Thoreau's book Walden (1854). This movie at the same time is a documentary record of a water surface; a free cinematographic adaptation of Henri David Thoreau's autobiographical book <em>‘Walden’</em>, a deep romantic landscape through continuous and random visual variations occurring on the surface and a crystallization of Hamaguchi’s style. Hamaguchi’s <em>‘Walden’</em> surface also becomes an interface where Hamaguchi the artist, and the spectator meet temporally to explore the noema of existence, nature, and cinema within a Heideggerian-verse. Besides the 2- minute durée of the film and its surface subject indicates a continuous oscillation between Kronos and Aion in the Deleuzian sense.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0758/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Thinking About Race in American Fiction and Origin

America has been multicultural from the beginning of the country’s inception. Blacks and whites have lived together throughout this history. The movies have also evolved during their history to include relations between subcultural groups, especially between Blacks and whites. Depictions of racial relations have evolved through different stages in the movies over time. Recent movies have displayed some new features. Blacks are affected by accounts of race that depict interracial relations and the constraints on African Americans. White views about race in general and Blacks in particular have had a major impact on the lives of African Americans. A new form of race depictions has emerged recently, as shown in two new films, American Fiction and Origin.

Chinese Science Fiction Movies' Innovations and Development Analysis Take the Series of The Wandering Earth as an Example

With an increasing output of Chinese science fiction movies in recent years, there are many innovative and creative strategies among these movies, taking the series The Wandering Earth as an example. It is considered to be valuable to analyze each new strategy of narrative and filmmaking technology in order to find out the proper ways for the future development of Chinese science fiction movies. Especially for the high competence of the Hollywood movie industry from its monopoly of genre movies, it is full of challenges to surpass the great achievement and influence of Hollywood. This paper is going to provide a summarization of the movie creativity of the series The Wandering Earth by reading literature. These summarized innovations will then be along with appropriate analysis which is targeting to explain their exact influence on filmmaking, the film market, and the audiences. As a result, future developing suggestions for Chinese science fiction movies are presented based on the recent movie industry status quo.

Our Roots Are Showing: American Media Stars Display Their Subcultural Origins

The neatness of our referring to societies as units of encryption ignores the many real situations when boundaries and memberships may not be clear or recognized. Members may participate in several societies. The American society has been based on a set of common agreements, including the definition of who is a member. The American defining ideas are recently subject to revision and rejection. Some recent movies and shows have concerned American media stars and their subcultural origins. They are not merely travelogues. They are also ways of repairing the social identities of groups that are now sometimes regarded by Americans as dangerous aliens with suspect motivations. Media stars return to their origins to praise subcultural values.

"Phil always did the castrating": Repression and Cowboy Masculinity in Thomas Savage's The Power of the Dog

Abstract: This article offers a reading of Savage's novel that explores the relationship between queerness and the Western. It contextualizes the novel within the shifting social mores of the sixties and shows how the popular character archetype of the "doomed homosexual" aligns with a vision of the "doomed West." It charts how Savage queers familiar Western signifiers—hands (barometers of manliness), the ambivalent symbol of the dog, and a rawhide rope (a symbol of control turned emblem of gay love). The argument is scaffolded by psychoanalytical readings, particularly Jung's concept of the "persona" and the "shadow" as a means of exploring repression and projection; Lacan's mirror stage as a source of confusion between the Ideal and the Horrifying; and Kristeva's work on abjection and visual trauma. It explores the importance of family in the shaping of identity; the despairingly limited role for women on the ranch; and how the masculine model of the cowboy might be inverted and challenged. References to Campion's recent movie of the book are included and offer alternative readings of key scenes.

Emerging trends of dalit portrayal in Hindi cinema: An analysis of the movies Aarakshan and Masaan

This research paper aims to explore the emerging trends of Dalit portrayal in Hindi cinema, with a special focus on two films Aarakshan and Masaan released in the twenty-first century and encapsulating the much-needed and long-awaited new paradigms of Dalit representation. The representation of Dalits in mainstream Indian cinema has evolved over the years, reflecting changing social dynamics and the increasing recognition of Dalit narratives. Dalit representation in Hindi cinema has also undergone significant transformations, moving beyond stereotypical roles and simplistic narratives. The films Aarakshan (2011) and Masaan (2015) stand out as examples of recent movies that have explored the Dalit experience with depth and nuance. By analyzing these two critically acclaimed movies, this paper seeks to examine the portrayal of Dalit characters, their socio-economic context, and the impact of these films on public discourse. These films depict the struggles, aspirations, and resilience of Dalit individuals in different social contexts. This research paper will analyze the portrayal of Dalit protagonists of these two movies, their agency, and the social issues they confront, shedding light on the evolving trends of Dalit representation in Hindi cinema.

Mapping Caste Violence in the Domestic Front: Representation of the Caste Questions in Contemporary Malayalam Cinema

Conservative modes of representation of the Dalit lives and the caste questions in Malayalam cinema used to adhere to the stereotypical portrayal of caste-based violence as a tool to evoke pity, fear or laughter. However, recent movies emphasise the revolt of the subaltern both in personal and public domains of discourse. This paper attempts to analyse two recent Malayalam films, Puzhu (the Worm) and Malayankunju (The Malaya Child) released in 2022 that blatantly deal with caste-based violence operational in the domestic sphere. The critique is based on two major questions: how do caste identity and caste-based violence function in the domestic interiors and in what ways do the dominant patriarchal discourses complicate the subjective positioning of women within and outside the household? The study identifies various elements that contribute to the construction of subjectivity of the Dalit and discusses the issues embedded in caste pride leading to catastrophe at the home-front through ostracisation and excision (either through murder or through mutilation) processes of those ones who do not conform to the dictated norms of casteists. Within the theoretical framework of structural and cultural violence, the paper analyses how caste-based violence and gender-based violence are types of structural violence, and discusses the legitimation of it sanctioned by various cultural elements.

Wall Street: on capitalism and the predatory instinct

ABSTRACT Financial markets have a social history. In the 19th century, birth of capital markets led to the birth of the stock exchange novel, which inspired H de Balzac, E Zola, etc. During the 1980s, the financialization of the economy saw the cinema captured this change through the financial thriller. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) inaugurates a list of recent movies that deals with the stock exchange. The film Wall Street shows us that financial activity allows rapid social ascension. The stock market activity is presented as a zero-sum game. Money simply passes from one pocket to another by the virtue of magic. The dynamic of capitalism thus finds part of their source in the greed of the individuals that it exploits. The market is the place where another form of economic rationality unfolds in the form of an instinct for predation which is not burdened by morality.

Home Is Where the Horror Is (2022)

Home Is Where the Horror Is (2022) Jason Zinoman (bio) Sometimes facing your fears isn't enough. You have to scrutinize them. In an attempt to understand my own nightmares—and the ones that shaped our culture—my first book, Shock Value, published a decade ago, examined one of the great eras of modern film: the revolutionary scary movies made between the late 1960s through the end of the following decade.1 I called them the New Horror. To tell the story of its artists—masters such as Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, and Dan O'Bannon among many others—I interviewed them about their work with an ear sensitive to what this group shared. One surprisingly common thing I discovered was an embarrassment about working in the genre itself. To the people who made Halloween (Carpenter, 1978) and Alien (Scott, 1979) horror, as they had understood it since they were young, was lowbrow, disreputable, the kind of thing you didn't want to tell your parents about. To hear these great artists tell it, the genre they worked in was kid's stuff. Sadly, most of the filmmakers I wrote about in the book have died, but part of their considerable legacy is to change the reputation of horror and consequently the atmosphere that their successors work in. The genre is not only bigger and more lucrative, a persistently popular part of the cultural diet, but also more respected. For young filmmakers, there is no shame in working in the genre of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974). There are downsides to the growing stature of horror, to be sure, but also [End Page 289] advantages, a new sense of the possible that allows for growth. The recent expansion of the genre is what inspired the article below, which I wrote for the cover of the "Arts & Leisure" section of the New York Times in 2018 about the artists at the forefront of an ambitious new direction in horror. Building on the work of their predecessors, their work appears unshackled from any status anxiety over genre and deals directly and expansively in mature themes. They are making movies that kids enjoy but are primarily aimed at adults. Since I wrote the article this trend has only intensified, and its impact is evident in recent movies such as Relic (James, 2020) and She Dies Tomorrow (Seimetz, 2020) that speak to the terror of isolation in the age of COVID-19 better than any new mainstream dramas. This new grown-up horror has produced movies that I believe will be studied and imitated just like those from the 1970s were. This essay, and the others in this journal, attempt to understand this new golden age. _____ What happens when your family is what frightens you? A new renaissance in scary movies skips jump scares in favor of dread based on adult fears. In Hereditary (Aster, 2018), bugs crawl from decapitated heads, ghosts lurk in the shadows, and an artist tries to communicate with the dead. But the most jarring moment of this terrifying new movie might be when Annie, a mother played by Toni Collette, tells her son she never wanted to have him and tried to induce a miscarriage. Then she wakes from this nightmare, unsettled by the thoughts rattling in her subconscious. Parental guilt is the real monster here. Moving into territory once the preserve of prestige dramas, horror has never been more bankable and celebrated than it is right now. And while evil clowns and serial killers at sorority houses still haunt young viewers (and make tons of money), we're in the midst of a golden age of grown-up horror. Hushed and characterdriven, this mix of indie fare and blockbusters works ferociously on adult anxieties in an age of dislocation. These movies have confronted liberal racism, economic worries, and family dysfunction, and while horror has always reflected the social and political concerns of its day, if you had to pinpoint a unifying theme that distinguishes this renaissance, it's the ominous danger of overwhelming grief. A character coping with the death of a loved one is the new car of teenagers heading to a...

Abortion Travels in Contemporary American Cinema: Parental Consent and the Bumpy Ride to Termination in Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s Unpregnant

Abstract Although abortion was legalized in 1973 through the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, it is state legislatures that have ultimately acted as the final arbiters on the matter ever since. As a result, only over the course of the last decade, more than two hundred abortion restrictions have been enacted nationwide in the United States. As more and more restrictions are put in place in an attempt at policing women’s bodies, the practice that came to be known somewhat inappropriately as ‘abortion tourism’ is becoming increasingly common. More and more women travel across state lines in order to benefit from a safe procedure while evading the legal limits imposed upon them in their home states. This is even more acutely so in the case of young, under-age women, as only a few states do not have parental consent statutes covering abortion provisions. It is against this background that my article discusses two recent movies which tackle the issue of teen pregnancy and ‘abortion mobility,’ Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) and Unpregnant (2020). I look at how both travel narratives illustrate, in different genres and manners, the hurdles (young) women have to navigate to gain access to necessary medical care and expose the state-sanctioned obstacles to abortion in two stories about female friendship and empathy above all.

Unbecoming Men

Throughout the history of popular Hindi cinema, the figure of the hero has been identifiable as the bearer of hegemonic masculinity, but in the last five years, this figure appears to have developed an existential crisis with respect to his masculinity. This article seeks to identify why the spotlight has shifted to non-dominant constructions of masculinity. It charts out the changing discourse of masculinity within Bollywood. It also places this in the context of a global masculinity crisis, while attempting to understand the changes within the Indian context propelling the crisis. Three recent popular movies, showcasing narratives of men struggling with issues such as alopecia, sexual dysfunction and a lack of agency, are discussed. The analysis of the male figure probes into why these specific deficiencies become shorthand to question the protagonist’s manliness, while also placing him in relation to women and other men around him who serve to accentuate his crisis.

Fashioning Spanish Cinema. Costume, Identity, and Stardom by Jorge Pérez

Reviewed by: Fashioning Spanish Cinema. Costume, Identity, and Stardom by Jorge Pérez Francisco Fernández de Alba Pérez, Jorge. Fashioning Spanish Cinema. Costume, Identity, and Stardom. U of Toronto P, 2021. 265 pp. ISBN: 978-4875-0911-8. This interdisciplinary new book by Jorge Pérez is full of illuminating insights about fashion and costume design in Spanish films. Some scholars who have previously devoted attention to the topic are Paul Julian Smith, Kathleen Vernon, and Eva Woods Peiró, though none dedicated monographs to the subject as completely as Pérez. Five chapters compose this book. The introduction is a foundational theoretical discussion regarding the difference between costume design and fashion, or the tension between feminist theory and fashion. The remaining chapters are meant to stand independently, and the author warns that they do not build to a general history of fashion and film. Neither are they organized chronologically. Instead, the book is driven by specific topics such as fashion labels and film directors, the examination of costume choices, and the supplemental meanings that costumes generate beyond characters' authenticity or verisimilitude. Despite the author's warning, I nevertheless perceive a general organizational principle in which the first and second [End Page 170] chapters focus on synergies generated by the collaboration between high fashion and film; in which chapters three and four aim to illuminate what is missing (more on this later); and in which the final chapter addresses the self-fashioning of stardom, or actors' off-screen need to produce and curate their personal brand as yet another professional skill. Chapter 1 discusses master couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga and his work for actors such as Conchita Montenegro, Sara Montiel, and Rocío Dúrcal. This chapter is a must-read for anyone interested in Balenciaga because it offers new details about his professional practice vis-à-vis the film industry. The chapter contains nuanced readings of several films and the way in which Balenciaga's designs functioned in (and out of) the films. Chapter 2 similarly focuses on labels and directors, in this case Almodóvar and the house of Chanel. Pérez concludes that the participation of designers in making costumes for film goes beyond symbiotic publicity, that we should consider as well the agency of actors, the interaction with design labels, and that couture, a spectacle into itself, creates narratives and affects independent of the films in which it is displayed. I mentioned earlier that chapters 3 and 4 could be conceptualized as "what is missing." Men's costume is often a missing part of fashion or film studies. Pérez's response is to start from the beginning, with the first piece of clothing many western men put on each day, by dedicating chapter three to thoroughly exploring men's underwear. From the comedia sexy to cine quinqui, men in underwear are represented as backward or modern, ridiculous comedic relief or sexual objects. Pérez argues that we can mark the stages of development of Spanish culture throughout the twentieth century by the type of underwear worn and the circumstances in which we see actors in their undergarments. In Chapter 4, Pérez details the ways in which immigrants are (un)dressed in recent Spanish films. Missing in some movies, Pérez tells us, are clear references to the scopic regime and awareness of the coloniality of power. The chapter explores how clothes (re)produce or confront dominant race relations by oversignifying non-white actors' attire or the lack of it. Even when movies are pushing for equality and integration, race and ethnicity continues to be marked in film by the sartorial hyper-visibility of the non-white immigrant body. Pérez concludes that the evolution of these films moves from exotifying and eroticizing through garment choice to, in the most recent movies, the possibility of a non-sexual transnational community emerging through fashion and style choices. Chapter 5 takes the readers from the screen to the red carpet. In a chapter that feels a rushed at the end, Pérez explains how having a personal sense of style has recently become a requirement for actors. From Victoria Abril to Penélope Cruz, briefly touching on...

Radical Welcome in the Archives: What Does It Really Mean to Say “You're Welcome Here”?

Radical Welcome in the Archives: What Does It Really Mean to Say “You're Welcome Here”?

The Beginning of Memory

The Beginning of Memory

Sequential Movie Genre Prediction Using Average Transition Probability with Clustering

In recent movie recommendations, one of the most important issues is to predict the user’s sequential behavior to be able to suggest the next movie to watch. However, capturing such sequential behavior is not easy because each user’s short-term or long-term behavior must be taken into account. For this reason, many research results show that the performance of recommending a specific movie is not good in a sequential recommendation. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based method for classifying users with similar movie purchase patterns and a movie genre prediction algorithm rather than the movie itself considering their short-term and long-term behaviors. The movie genre prediction does not recommend a specific movie, but it predicts the genre for the next movie to watch in consideration of each user’s preference for the movie genre based on the genre included in the movie. Using this, it will be possible to provide appropriate guidelines for recommending movies including the genres to users who tend to prefer a specific genre. In particular, in this study, users with similar genre preferences are organized into clusters to recommend genres. For clusters that do not have relatively specific tendencies, genre prediction is performed by appropriately trimming genres that are not necessary for recommendation in order to improve performance. We evaluate our method on well-known movie data sets and qualitatively determine that it captures personalized dynamics and is able to make meaningful recommendations.

An Exploration of Implicit Racial Bias as a Source of Diagnostic Error.

Recent events led this author to realize that an error made during the Vietnam War by him and others had been due to focusing too narrowly on predisposing factors for PTSD while failing to consciously acknowledge acute systemic stressors. In not accepting that along with the stress of combat, Black troops daily experienced acute pervasive systemic racism, he failed to understand correctly their disproportionately higher levels of PTSD when compared to white troops. Motivating factors to examine this error included a recent movie by Spike Lee. Oral histories of Black veterans were then used to research the experience of Blacks in the military in two world wars and the Vietnam War. Little change in the treatment of Black service members was evident across the time frame which included WWI, WWII and the Vietnam War. An understanding of Shay's concept of moral injury was found very valuable in understanding the consequences of PTSD.

경계 허물기에 의한 ‘노이즈’의 변신 - 영화 [언더 더 스킨]의 사운드디자인 분석을 중심으로

It is noteworthy that the boundaries of music, dialogue, and sound, which are the three major elements of sound, are becoming blurred, and that the boundaries are becoming blurred in recent movie soundtracks. Advances in electronic technology have made recording possible and also allowing sound to be captured. As a result, noise became recognizable. Since then, the soundtrack of modern movies, which tried to reject and remove noise, has evolved in the direction of actively using noise. The use of noise as a new material for music opened up a world of more flexible and rich film sound. This paper examines the aspect of breaking down the sound boundary, focusing on the use of noise in the movie <Under the Skin>. In particular, the analysis will be focused on the 'narrative use' of noise in the film. As a background study, I will outline the private overview of noise music and noise sound of the futurists leading to Luigi Russolo, John Cage, and Pierre Schaeffer, and the meaning of noise treated from an aesthetic point of view. In addition, in order to demonstrate the aesthetic aspect of noise applied in the sound of modern movies, the sound of the movie <Under the Skin> is specifically analyzed and the relationship with the image is considered. Through the above discussion, this paper tries to newly illuminate the aesthetic meaning of 'noise' as a sound object in the field of movie sound.

The Image of Class Immobility in Chang-dong Lee’s Film Burning and William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”

Chang-dong Lee is a well-known Korean director whose films reflect the repressive social and political reality of South Korea. The film Burning (2018) is one of his recent movies which well reveals a current depressing atmosphere of the young people in contemporary Korea. The narrative and the construction of the movie follows the plot of William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning” (1938). The director adroitly adopted and transformed the plot-line to fit into the current atmosphere and times of the Korean society. Therefore, this thesis aims to discuss how the film elaborates the culture of the early southern US, which contemporary Korea bears no resemblance to, and modify it into the tragedy – extreme class inequality and immobility – which Korean society faces nowadays. This paper places the movie in a dialogue with the original text and, based on it, examines the social ramifications of the movie text. In doing so, it focuses on how both works are alike in the aspect of the devastating and fearful reality of each society.

Does media-based health risk communication affect commercial health insurance demand? Evidence from China

ABSTRACT In recent years, the mass media (such as TV shows and movies) plays an important role in communication with the general public. In this paper, we investigate the impact of a recent movie from China, ‘Dying to Survive’, on the demand for commercial health insurance. To explore this impact, a fixed-effect model and instrumental variable estimation are utilized, and the causal effect of movie-based health risk communication on commercial health insurance demand is studied. The result shows that the cumulative box office value of a movie has a significantly positive impact on the income from commercial health insurance premium, with a one- or two-day lag. This movie has encouraged viewers to purchase short-term commercial health insurance rather than long-term insurance. In addition, the heterogeneity of the impact exists for movie arrangement rate, average family size, urbanization rate, medical resource level, and per capita disposable income. The results show that sufficient health risk communication can improve the social ‘visibility’ of health risk.