Ethnic humor used to play an important role in vaudeville, as immigrant Europeans learned to get along by gently ribbing others and themselves. Today, ethnic jokes are the mainstay of Frank De Lima, the most popular stand-up comedian in Hawai`i. But the civil rights revolution on the U.S. mainland destroyed ethnic humor, which was seen […]

“As long as you got the dough, you’re fine” is the way a taxi driver sums up life in Los Angeles in the film Surviving Paradise, written and directed by Kamshad Kooshan. But the content of the film, far more optimistic than the racial analysis contained in Grand Canyon (1992), belies his criticism of the City of Angels.

Despite the existence of more than seventy gay bars in Tokyo alone, the subject of homosexuality is taboo in Japan. In the film Okoge (1992) two 1990s lovers break the taboo at a banquet of coworkers, though one lover eventually marries a woman, whereupon the other lover divorces his wife to live with a transvestite. Now in Taboo (Gohatto)

At the beginning of The Thin Blue Lie, Mayor Frank Rizzo (played by Paul Sorvino) is trying to change the charter of the City of Philadelphia so that he can run for an unprecedented third term in 1978. But in 1976, Jonathan Neumann (played by Rob Morrow) joins the staff of a Philadelphia newspaper. During his

What was is like to live in San Francisco during World War II? This question fascinates Scott King, writer and cinematographer for Treasure Island, who evidently does not want to claim credit as director. He provides a movie serial, newsreels, and a film in black and white with authentic 1940s sets, props, and clothing, but he

  When Unbreakable begins, titles tells us how many comic books are sold daily, and how much time enthusiasts spend reading comic books in their lifetime. During the first segment, we witness a physician who is attending to the birth of Elijah Price, an African American child, in a Philadelphia department store in 1961; the baby’s arms

A woman about to embark on a career as a ‘cellist gives up her interest in music to marry a brilliant scientist, who occupies the DuPont Chair of Genetics at the University of Vermont. The couple have a daughter, to whom the mother is so devoted that she cries when she sees her daughter off

The capital of the 1960s flower children was San Francisco. Some hippies spurned the urban existence and established communal settlements in Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, living simply with vegetables on their property. One of the attractions was free love, and some love children were born, but not all were prepared

When will male-dominant Latin cultures ever allow women’s liberation? In Woman on Top, director Fina Torres poses this question of Toninho Oliveira (played by Murilo Benício), the owner of a successful restaurant in Bahía, Brazil, who has relegated his wife Isabella (played by Penelope Cruz) to the kitchen as chef while he gets all the credit

The German film Aimée and Jaguar, based on Erica Fischer’s 1994 book of the same title and directed by Max Färberböck, is a biography of how beautiful Lilly Wust (played by Juliane Köhler) coped with everyday life in Berlin during the last twenty months of World War II, when the city was being bombed and Allied