As the spring semester starts and the temperature continues to drop, it’s tempting to never leave your dorm room. Take a break from studying and venture out to Smith’s Museum of Art, where several of this month’s exhibits will take your mind off of the freezing weather outside.
Posts published in “Arts”
Until the fifth episode of its second season, “Grown-ish” didn’t seem to understand its target audience. A cursory glance at the show could suggest otherwise. After all, it seems to have all the fixings of a show that would appeal to a Gen Z audience. The cast is hot and diverse. The show’s Twitter savvily abstains from starting its tweets in upper case. Its Instagram features clips of its characters clapping back in a way that is just almost funny. And the premise of the show does seem like it could yield some relatable situations: it follows Zoey Johnson (Yara Shahidi) and her group of friends at the fictional university Cal-U. Each of the friends has one or two identities—Republican, Jewish, drug dealer, stoner—in which the writers have rooted their personalities, which are drawn just distinctly enough that they could be real people.
There seems to be something about the “bury the gays” trope that screenwriters just can’t get enough of. You can find it in everything, from Degrassi to NCIS to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you find a non-straight or non-cisgender character you like, chances are that they’ll be killed off, kicked out of their home to never be seen again or otherwise conveniently erased from the main storyline. Are LGBTQIA+ folks in the media always doomed to a bleak future, or can room be made for more positive endings?
Are you lonely? If you’re a college student, the answer is likely to be yes. A 2017 survey on 48,000 university students found that 64 percent of them felt “very lonely” in the past 12 months, and reports of depression and anxiety have been increasingly on the rise in America.
If you’re South Asian, or South Asian American or friends with someone from either demographic, you’ve probably heard about Netflix’s latest addition to the political comedy genre: “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj.”
It’s always a gamble to see a band that hasn’t been popular in years. Will the concert be a desperate shot at reviving the nostalgia of old fans, or will it be able to engage new listeners too? I wondered this on my way to Echo & The Bunnymen’s show in Northampton last week.
Despite the chill, a crowd of students gathered together last Thursday night to watch the annual “Celebration” ceremony on Wilson’s steps. This was the event’s 27th year and included performances by individual students, several Quad houses and a variety of acapella and student organizations.
“Suspiria” is bad. “Suspiria” is a mess. “Suspiria” is a movie set in 1977 Berlin that’s about both a psychotherapist mourning his wife and about an American Mennonite girl who gets admitted into a prestigious dance academy that turns out to run by a coven of witches. “Suspiria” tries to do many things and does none of them well. But this and its other technical problems are the least of its flaws. In fact its greatest flaw — no, its greatest sin — lies in what it tries to seem like it’s saying and what it instead is actually saying.
“You can do anything with my legacy, but never make me boring.” The legendary singer and frontman of Queen, Freddie Mercury, was quoted as saying this before his tragic death from AIDS-related causes in 1991. This writer believes that even the most aggressive attempt to make Freddie Mercury’s story boring would be impossible. “Bohemian Rhapsody” — a biographical movie about Queen — is entertaining, but beneath its flashy surface, it is as hollow and clichéd as Mercury was complex and revolutionary. The film’s fun yet disappointing result can be attributed to a number of factors: pre-production limbo, cast changes, director replacements and questionable narrative choices regarding the singer’s sexuality. All of this culminates in an ultimately forgettable movie. But this movie is about Freddie Mercury — how is that possible?
Meet Serena: she regularly gets kicked out of movie theatres, snaps at coworkers in her microbiology lab and corrects the grammar of her date mid-hookup. In her opinion, the fewer people she has to fake kindness towards, the better. But after taking a critique of a colleague too far, she must undergo sensitivity training if she wants to keep her job.