Archive

The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Nightmare Before Christmas, often promoted as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, is a 1993 American stop motion musical fantasy film directed by Henry Selick and produced/co-written by Tim Burton. It tells the story of Jack Skellington, a being from "Halloween Town" who opens a portal to "Christmas Town" and decides to celebrate the holiday, with some dastardly and comical consequences.

Wales African Film Festival

Watch Africa 2013 - The first ever Wales African Film FestivalsciSCREEN are pleased to be supporting this new festival which takes place between 30th November and 7th December.

Plausibility of the cloning scenario

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Clearly central to the plot of this film are Sam’s clones. They appear not only to look and behave similarly (although there may be one or two hints that they aren’t absolutely identical) but also share a core memory set, although again there may be hints that these aren’t identical (e.g. a moment of hesitation about his daughter).

What and who is ‘family’?

Importantly, ‘generation’ and ‘family’ is something that is achieved through the everyday work of practical kinship. While the biological facts of generations are, to a certain extent, given, the realisation of generations and family in everyday life is something that we all achieve through our everyday practical interactional work with others.

A Cultural Geographer’s View.

TS Eliot said it is the instinct of every living thing to persist in its own being. Not just humans or animals or insects or viruses, but all living things; and from the example of ‘Moon’, we can perhaps say that Eliot’s assertion also includes clones.

Memory manipulation in Moon

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The big reveal at the midpoint of the film ‘Moon’ is that Sam is some sort of clone, one in a series of clones that are activated, do their jobs and wear down before being ‘disposed of’, at which point the next clone is activated to take over, and on it goes. The intrigue occurs when a clone is activated when one clone is activated while the previous one is still active, and this revealing the whole set-up to both of them.

Moon

Astronaut Sam Bell has a quintessentially personal encounter toward the end of his three-year stint on the Moon, where he, working alongside his computer, GERTY, sends back to Earth parcels of a resource that has helped diminish our planet's power problems.

Like Father, Like Son

Ryota Nonomiya is a successful businessman driven by money. When he learns that his biological son was switched with another child after birth, he must make a life-changing decision and choose his true son or the boy he raised as his own.

Psychiatry and A Single Man

Psychiatry and the movies have grown up together. Both were in their infancy at the turn of the century and then went on to make massive advances within the following decades. Maybe this is why they have always shared a relationship which can be described as both complementary but also hostile. Both disciplines share a voyeuristic interest in appraising the body and are particularly interested when that body does not function as it should prompting a Foucauldian approach to the analysis of psychiatric discourses in film.

Grief and A Single Man

This film is a study of a gay man in grief who contemplates suicide but over the course of one day finds solace in small pleasures. From a psychiatric point of view it deals with the overlap between grief and depression and the effect of prejudice on the mental health of society's stigmatized minorities. Concepts of 'normality' change in society over time and influence the practice of psychiatry. Homosexuality only became legal in the UK in 1967.