That’s something that I heard a lot back when I was cheerleading in high school. A football player grabbed your ass while he was running out on the field? Someone told you that the team lost because you didn’t smile more? At the after-game party, you were called a tease if you didn’t drink enough to excuse whatever happened later that night? It was all just a case of boys being boys.
“They’ll grow out of it.” “They’re under a lot of pressure right now.” “Your job is help them celebrate when they win and to make them feel better when they lose.” I heard all of that back when I was cheerleading and, because I usually heard it from older women who were supposed to be looking out for me, I usually accepted it. If someone said something that made me cry, I told myself it was my fault for not understanding how difficult it was to be a good player on a bad team. If someone accused me of sending out mixed signals or giving someone the wrong idea, I didn’t say, “That’s your problem for not paying attention.” Instead, I felt guilty about it, as if I had done something wrong. My job was to support the team. I was there to cheer for the boys. Half of the time, I loved being a cheerleader. I loved the sisterhood. I love the thrill of pumping up the people in the bleachers. I enjoyed feeling as if I had played a role whenever one of our teams won a game. The other half of the time, I was a nervous wreck because I worried I had done something wrong.
I guess that’s why I related to the main character in Stand Against Fear when I watched it earlier today. (It’s on YouTube.) Sarah Chalke plays a cheerleader who is inappropriately touched by a football player (Lochlyn Munro). He thinks that he can get away with anything because he’s the star of the football team and his father’s rich. When the police and the school refuse to do anything, the cheerleader sues the football player for sexual harassment.
I don’t know if this movie was based on a true story but watching it brought back a lot of memories of high school. The dread of knowing that you’re going to be treated like an object, the fear of not fitting in, and the helplessness of knowing that no one is going to be on your side, Stand Against Fear captured all of that. When Sarah Chalke and her family finally stood up for themselves, I wanted to cheer. It was inspiring to see.
As for me, it wasn’t until a few years after I graduated from high school that I looked back and realized just how messed up all of that was. Whenever I run into any of my old cheerleading friends today, we inevitably start talking about the past and we always agree that we spent way too much time worrying about the boys when we should have been worrying about ourselves. As this movie shows, it takes strength to stand up for yourself but it’s always the right thing to do.
It’s been a while since I’ve written about any of my favorite romantic films. Today, I thought I would discuss the film that just might be my favorite love story of them all, and that’s the 1995 version of PERSUASION. Based on Jane Austen’s final completed novel, PERSUASION tells the story of Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) who was persuaded eight years earlier, at the age of 19, to reject the hand of the man she loved, Captain Frederick Wentworth (Ciarán Hinds). At the time, Wentworth had no fortune or social standing, but the ensuing years seemed to bring both to the seafaring captain. When fate unexpectedly brings them back together, Anne’s past feelings of love re-emerge, and so does her regret for her earlier decision. After all these years, does the still-single Captain Wentworth love her, or is he ready to move on?
PERSUASION features incredible turns from Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds as Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth. Their performances aren’t built around grand gestures or sweeping declarations of love. They’re built on quick glances, emotional restraint, and an ability to convey lingering pain, regret, and feelings of love that began many years earlier but have never gone away. Their chemistry isn’t flashy, but it is authentic, built over many years rather than some instant attraction. These character traits may seem old-fashioned and unnecessary in this day and time, but the action in the film takes place in early 1800’s where this behavior would have been perfectly natural.
Speaking of “perfectly natural,” director Roger Michell’s realistic presentation of the material is one of the film’s key strengths as far as I’m concerned. Avoiding the polish of most period dramas, PERSUASION embraces the weathered houses, imperfect landscapes, simple costumes, and yes, even the less than glamourous looks of the cast. It seems like we’re watching real people living in the real world instead of impossibly attractive men and women playing dress up. As the lead characters seem to be falling deeper into love over the course of the film, their blossoming happiness makes them more attractive.
If I haven’t made it clear enough, if you’re looking for a movie that throws a lot of overly dramatic plot twists and simple solutions your way, PERSUASION is probably not the movie for you. But if you enjoy a deliberately paced, mature story that deals with messy themes of missed opportunities, personal growth, and forgiveness, then you just may love it. There are moments when Anne simply watches Wentworth across a room, or clutches a chair as he enters a room, where I felt such a strong connection to the characters. Sometimes the most powerful emotions truly are those that are left unspoken. This film will reward your patience if you stick with it, and its final scenes are very satisfying to me because of what the characters have gone through to reach that point.
PERSUASION is a film that I return to again and again when I’m stressed or need a pick-me-up. It just makes me feel good. In my opinion, it isn’t just one of the best Jane Austen movies, it’s one of the best romantic dramas out there, and I highly recommend it!
There are films that entertain, films that impress, and then there are films that simply break you. Grave of the Fireflies, directed by Isao Takahata and released by Studio Ghibli in 1988, belongs firmly to that final category. It is one of the most devastating pieces of cinema ever committed to screen — animated or otherwise — and its power has not dimmed a single watt in the decades since its release. If anything, it has only grown heavier with time, which says something quietly terrible about the state of the world we keep building and destroying.
The film is an adaptation of a semi-autobiographical short story of the same name written by Akiyuki Nosaka, first published in 1967. Nosaka drew directly from his own traumatic experience as a child survivor of the American firebombing of Kobe and Nishinomiya during the final months of World War II. He lost his adopted younger sister, Keiko, to malnutrition during that period, and spent much of the rest of his life consumed by guilt over her death — guilt that he transformed into literature as a form of personal penance. The story, and by extension Takahata’s film, is not simply a war narrative. It is a confession. That emotional honesty is what gives Grave of the Fireflies its extraordinary moral weight and separates it from more conventional wartime dramas.
The story follows two siblings—fourteen-year-old Seita and his four-year-old sister Setsuko—who are left to fend for themselves in the ruins of wartime Japan after their mother is killed in an air raid. Their father is away serving in the Imperial Navy, and the children initially take refuge with a distant aunt whose cold pragmatism and growing resentment become as suffocating as the war itself. Eventually, Seita takes Setsuko, and the two retreat to a small abandoned shelter near a lake, where they attempt to survive on dwindling resources. What follows is a story of extraordinary love between two children set against the backdrop of a society collapsing under the weight of its own catastrophic choices. Takahata makes no political speeches; he does not need to. The tragedy unfolds with quiet, terrible inevitability, and the film’s opening scene—in which we learn from the outset that Seita does not survive—ensures that every fleeting moment of joy between the siblings is shadowed by grief already lodged in our chests.
It is worth pausing on the animation itself, because Grave of the Fireflies is a masterwork of the form. Takahata consistently pushed back against the notion that animation was a lesser medium suited only to fantasy or comedy, and here he uses it to render the physical reality of war with extraordinary specificity: the blistering heat of an air raid reflected in Setsuko’s wide eyes, the sickly pallor of a malnourished child’s skin, the gentle glow of fireflies against the blue-black darkness of a summer night. Studio Ghibli’s artists create a version of wartime Japan that feels tactile and achingly real, and the deliberate contrast between the natural beauty of the countryside and the devastation wrought by human violence is one of the film’s most quietly devastating achievements. The fireflies themselves—insects that glow brilliantly for a short time and then die—function as one of cinema’s most elegantly constructed symbols, one the film earns rather than imposes.
Grave of the Fireflies occupies a unique and important place in the history of how anime has been received in the West. For decades, Western audiences and critics tended to treat animation as a genre rather than a medium—something inherently juvenile, made for children, and incapable of the emotional or artistic range associated with live-action film. Anime, with its distinct visual language, was often doubly dismissed as too foreign, too strange, or too cartoonish. The arrival of Studio Ghibli films in Western markets—and Grave of the Fireflies in particular—fundamentally challenged that assumption. Here was an animated film that dealt with death, starvation, grief, and moral ambiguity with more unflinching honesty than most of Hollywood’s prestigious war dramas. Roger Ebert, who gave the film four stars, famously described it as one of the greatest war films ever made—a statement that helped elevate not just the film but animation’s broader cultural status. Grave of the Fireflies helped pave the way for deeper Western critical engagement with anime as a serious art form, a conversation that continued through works like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Spirited Away, and persists into the present era of global anime fandom. Without Takahata’s film insisting on animation’s capacity for genuine tragedy, that shift might have taken far longer.
The film also complicates some of the West’s more self-flattering narratives about World War II. Grave of the Fireflies does not engage with questions of who started the war or who was morally right; it simply shows two Japanese children dying slowly in the wreckage of American bombing campaigns and asks the viewer to sit with that reality. This is not a film that endorses Japanese imperialism or absolves the government whose war Seita and Setsuko ultimately suffer from. Instead, it refuses to let civilian suffering disappear behind the abstractions of historical victory. That refusal has made it an uncomfortable but essential work in discussions about the human cost of war.
One cannot watch Grave of the Fireflies today and remain complacent about the news cycles documenting conflicts around the world. The images of starving children in Gaza, orphaned families in Ukraine, and displaced populations in Sudan are a visceral, real-world echo of Seita and Setsuko’s plight. The film acts as a powerful antidote to the desensitization that can occur in a world numb to constant tragedy. When we scroll past headlines or see statistics of casualties, we are abstracting suffering. The film refuses to let us do that. The reality of malnutrition and starvation is put on screen in a way that feels almost too intimate to watch, from Setsuko’s distended belly to the sores that form on her skin. The film forces a confrontation with the fact that war’s “collateral damage” is not a number, but millions of individual, human stories—stories of children robbed of their childhood, their innocence, and ultimately, their lives, just like Setsuko and Seita. The cyclical nature of conflict means that for every generation, there is a new set of children living out this same tragedy, and the film’s refusal to offer easy catharsis or redemption makes it an enduring, uncomfortable mirror.
Grave of the Fireflies is not an easy film to recommend in the conventional sense. It is not something one watches for enjoyment, and it offers no catharsis in the traditional Hollywood mold—no heroic sacrifice redeemed, no peace restored, no comforting resolution. What it offers instead is something rarer and more valuable: witness. It is a film that confronts the true cost of war and refuses to look away, doing so through animation with a grace and rigor that should permanently dispel any lingering notion that the medium cannot carry the full weight of human experience. Nearly four decades after its release, Grave of the Fireflies remains one of the most important films ever made—a eulogy for two children, and by extension, for every child the world has failed to protect.
Today, if Cecil B. DeMille is known at all, it’s for directing Biblical epics like The Ten Commandments. However, there was much more to DeMille’s career than just that one film. DeMille got his start during the early silent era and he quickly established himself as one of Hollywood’s first superstar directors. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he survived the transition to sound and he remained a force in Hollywood at a time when many of the other silent directors were fading into obscurity. DeMille played a key role in the founding of what would become the American film industry. He began his career in 1914 and he made his last film in 1958. That’s quite a legacy.
In 1950, when filming Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder needed someone to play the key role of one of Norma Desmond’s former directors. Who better to represent the old style of Hollywood than Cecil B. DeMille? In the scene below, DeMille plays himself. Norma Desmond is, of course, played by Gloria Swanson, an actress whom DeMille had directed in the past.
From Sunset Boulevard, here’s a scene that I love.
4 (or more) Shots From 4 (or more) Films is just what it says it is, 4 (or more) shots from 4 (or more) of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 (or more) Shots From 4 (or more) Films lets the visuals do the talking.
June 22nd would have been the the 120th birthday of Billy Wilder.
Billy Wilder was born in what was-then Austria-Hungary and what is today Poland. Having started his film career as a screenwriter in Germany, Wilder fled to the United States after the rise of Hitler. (Many members of Wilder’s family would subsequently die in the Holocaust.) He went on to establish himself as one of the great studio directors, a filmmaker who could seemingly master any genre and whose films were often distinguished by an irreverent wit and a welcome skepticism when it came to accepting any sort of conventional wisdom. He made the type of films that could only be made by someone who had seen humanity at its worst but who also understood what people were capable of at their best. Wilder made dramas that could make you laugh and comedies that could make you cry. He was a master filmmaker, one whose work continues to influence directors to this day.
Belatedly, in honor of Billy Wilder’s legacy, the Shattered Lens presents….
4 Shots From 4 Billy Wilder Films
Double Indemnity (1944, dir by Billy Wilder, DP: John Seitz)
Sunset Boulevard (1950, dir by Billy Wilder, DP; John F. Seitz)
Sabrina (1954, dir by Billy Wilder, DP: Charles Lang)
The Apartment (1960, dir by Billy Wilder, DP: Ernest Laszlo)
In 1986, a real-life Cinderella wants to see the band that uses her name. Her wicked sisters have other plans. It’s a good thing that she’s got a magic guitar. She not only goes to the concert but she also leaves with the band and hopefully, she’ll eventually hook up with Bon Jovi.
Mark Rezyka also directed videos for KISS, Testament, Joan Jett and Survivor, amongst others.
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Pacific Blue, a cop show that aired from 1996 to 2000 on the USA Network! It’s currently streaming everywhere, though I’m watching it on Tubi.
This week, Chris is finally sent to prison.
Episode 4.8 “Heat In The Hole”
(Dir by Terence H. Winkless, originally aired on October 11th, 1998)
This is the dumbest episode of Pacific Blue yet and that’s really saying something.
The incarcerated are being murdered at the local women’s prison so, of course, a bicycle cop is sent in undercover. Actually, two bicycle cops are sent in. The homicide squad wants Chris to go in and pretend to be a prisoner. TC gets jealous of the hunky homicide detective who is in charge of the case so he assigns Bobby to go undercover as a prison guard and keep an eye on Chris.
This is one of those women’s prisons where everyone is young and attractive (no meth addicts here!) and apparently the official uniform is a tank top. It doesn’t take long for Chris to establish herself as being tough and willing to fight. Every prisoner comes to respect her, which is important because, when a riot breaks out, Chris reveals she’s a cop and that she needs the help of the prisoners.
And the prisoners are cool with that.
Seriously.
“Ignore the cop part,” someone says, “Think of how she’s treated us!”
That’s the power of being a bicycle cop. You can show up in a prison, beat people up for two days, betray everyone’s confidence, and the prisoners will still forgive you for …. reasons, I guess.
Needless to say, if you’re an undercover cop in prison, do not reveal the truth in the middle of a prison riot. That might work on Pacific Blue but it’s probably the dumbest thing you can do in real life.
While TC is sitting around at home worried, Monica sees this as her chance to make a move on him. Considering that TC and Chris haven’t stopped arguing since they impulsively got married in Vegas, maybe Monica isn’t really the problem here. I know that we’re supposed to be rooting for TC and Chris but neither one of them is particularly likable. I would not want to go out on a couples date with them.
At the end of this episode, two corrupt prison guards are arrested. Chris leaves the prison. TC pretends to be happy about it.
What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable or streaming? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
If you’re having trouble getting to sleep tonight, you can always go over to Prime or Tubi and enjoy 1995’s Hackers.
Hackers is a film about …. well, it’s right there in the title. They’re hackers. They’re cool. They’re hot. They’re sexy. And they are way into computers! They know everything that there is to know about exploring the internet, breaking into protected accounts, and rewriting code. They know all about viruses, both how to spread them and how to cure them. And they’re all teenagers! The coolest kids at school are totally into computers and they’ve all got nicknames.
Hackers is very much a film of the 90s. When this film came out, the Internet was still exotic and it was assumed that anyone who could write code had to be an eccentric genius with a larger-than-life personality. Johnny Lee Miller is Dade Murphy, a.k.a. Zero Cool. When he was a kid, he almost crashed the global economy. Matthew Lillard is Emmanuel Goldstein, also known as Cereal Killer. Lillard is hyperactive and he yells a lot but one can be sure that he’ll be a Silicon Valley billionaire by the time he’s 22. Angelina Jolie is Kate Libby, also known as Acid Burn. Hackers was early in Jolie’s career, back when she had so much personality and charisma that she seemed like she might literally step off of the screen and ask you if you wanted to step outside to smoke a joint or maybe do something a bit wilder. All of the hackers go to high school together. They all hack computers together. And they all find themselves targeted by The Plague (Fisher Stevens), a super hacker who is so evil that he rides a skateboard to work.
It’s a perfectly ludicrous film but it’s so cheerfully and excessively stylish and Miller and Jolie have so much chemistry that it doesn’t really matter whether or not the film makes any sense. This is one of those films where The Plague hatches his evil scheme while standing in a neon room surrounded by screens, as if the film is suggesting that The Plague actually lives in the middle of the Internet. The music is early EDM. The action is fast. The cast has charisma to burn. This film is about as 90s as a film can get.
Johnny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie (who was 20 when she shot this film) were married shortly after the film’s release and, though the marriage may not have lasted, their chemistry is explosive. For lack of a better term, they are totally into each other and it’s exiting to watch them interact. The end credits roll over a scene of them undressing and making love in a pool and it’s the perfect ending for this film, a jolt of energy that feels like the proper way to celebrate having saved the world from collapse. It’s also the type of thing that few studio films would be willing to do today. Somehow, 2026 has turned out to be more puritanical than 1995 and progressiveness has, for many, come to mean either chastity or performative asexuality. It’s as if both Hollywood and many modern critics have been captured by Orwell’s Anti-Sex League. (Just consider the bizarre reaction that many had to Christopher Nolan including a sex scene in Oppenheimer.) Hackers may not be a realistic portrayal of programmers or hackers but it is reminder of a time when movies were not only fun but they were also sexy. Watching the film, one regrets that Johnny Lee Miller never became a big star and that Angelina Jolie is no longer the unpredictable force a nature that she once was.
Hackers is a trip to a time that may have only existed in our imaginations but it’s still nice to go back and visit on occasion.
After her husband is killed in a car accident, Sarah (Teri Polo) retreats to their gigantic suburban home. She spends her time painting pictures and resisting the efforts of her daughter (Jonetta Kaiser) and her best friend (Jamie-Lynne Sigler) to get her to move on with her life. To me, it seemed pretty obvious that Sarah was deeply depressed and everyone should really have just backed off and let her recover at her own pace. However, in the film, six months have passed since her husband’s death and, in the world of Lifetime, that means that it’s time to get back on the dating scene. Sarah’s daughter assures her that “Dad” would have wanted her to move on.
(Yes, I’m sure that Dad is sitting in the afterlife, thrilled at the idea of his widow finding a new lover less than a year after his death.)
Sarah accompanies her daughter to a speed-dating event. She goes on 20 dates in two hours. 19 of those dates are duds. But the twentieth — oh my God. Jack (Dylan Walsh) is handsome and successful and, as a widower, he understands what Sarah is going through. Even more importantly, Jack has just moved in across the street from Sarah! What a romantic coincidence! Soon, Sarah is falling for Jack and Jack appears to be falling for Sarah.
But then the neighbor turns up dead.
For reasons that aren’t really clear, Sarah doesn’t seem to have really liked Sylvia (Deborah Rennard) that much. Sylvia was nosy, the type of neighbor who stood out on her balcony and kept an eye on what everyone else was doing. Sarah and her daughter referred to Sylvia as being “the neighborhood watch” and they would go out of their way to avoid talking to Sylvia. I think the film means for us to sympathize with Sarah but, seeing as how we only see Sylvia being polite and friendly to Sarah, it’s a bit difficult to really be on Sarah’s side. If anything, in this case, Sarah seems like the bad and judgmental neighbor. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, though. Someone breaks into Sylvia’s house and strangles her. And Sarah comes to suspect that the culprit might have been …. JACK!
This Lifetime movie had a fairly interesting mystery. I will admit that I figured out what was going on long before Sarah did but then again, I’ve probably watched a lot more Lifetime films than she has. The best thing about the film is that everyone lived in an extremely big house. It’s always nice to see that the Lifetime tradition of huge suburban houses is still alive. I also liked the fact that Sarah had enough money that she could deal with her grief by painting for six months. There’s no tragedy so great that it can’t lead to more leisure time.
That said, Sarah was not a particularly likable protagonist. I think if the film had been set a year after her husband’s death, as opposed to just six months, I probably would have had more sympathy for both her and her daughter. As it was, it seemed like Sarah’s daughter was trying to force her mom to move on too quickly and it also seemed like Sarah was constantly allowing herself to be pushed into a situation for which she wasn’t emotionally ready. Jamie-Lynne Sigler’s character was actually far more interesting than Sarah’s. Maybe Sigler and Teri Polo should have switched roles. There’s no way Sigler would have allowed herself to be guilted into speed dating.
Oh well. It may not have been a perfect film but at least the houses were lovely to look at.
Through the Shattered Lens 