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“Trading Places: A Comic Switch with an Eye on Eddie Murphy” By Arnold Anthony Schmidt Most of us have spent time daydreaming about “what if?” What if we were richer? Smarter? More athletic? Less shy? Lots of things. In the course of dreaming, we perhaps consider which person in the world we’d like to change […]

“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! – […]