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“The Manchurian Candidate: A Political Thriller That Packs a Wallop”  By Arnold Anthony Schmidt  Back in the day, talk of the Beatles and “Beatle-mania” saturated the news. My mother claimed that, when it came pop star frenzy, her generation had all of us (then) young people beat. After all, she’d been one of the thousands of […]

Spectacle & Personality: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette  By Arnold Anthony Schmidt  Legend has it that Marie Antoinette, when confronted with the poverty of breadless peasants, reportedly said “let them eat cake.” This is one of those “facts” that we all know about the eighteenth-century French queen, and it’s actually not true. For the many who […]

Rebel Without a Cause and “The Kids Today!” By Arnold Anthony Schmidt It seems as if people have always complained about “the kids today!” Those young people don’t respect their elders. They’re wild. Too sexual. The satirist Juvenal, writing in the second century, paints Roman youth – and, in fairness, pretty much everyone else! – […]

Kiss Me Deadly: A Classic Film Noir with a Twist  By Arnold Anthony Schmid Admit it: when you think about film noir, you don’t associate it with the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti! Yet the suggestive role played by Rossetti’s 1862 sonnet “Remember” in Kiss Me Deadly illustrates only one of the many things that make […]