Word: suburban
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...director Douglas Sirk, whose soapy melodramas like All That Heaven Allows (1955) are respected by film buffs for their baroque sentimentality and cynical undertones. Directed by Todd Haynes, Far from Heaven stars Julianne Moore as a white 1950s housewife who falls for her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), scandalizing the suburban populace of Hartford, Conn. Quaid is her overachieving husband, who confesses to her that he's gay. The expertly rendered performance (plus his own comeback story) could get Quaid his first Oscar nomination. "I had success back in the '80s, but I never really appreciated it then," he says...
Maybe it helped that Sheeler took up photography nonchalantly around 1910, when he was 27 and simply looking for a way to earn extra money by making documentary and commercial photographs of grand suburban houses. But it didn't take him long to see the larger possibilities of this new toy. During a trip to Europe a few years before, he was converted to the work of Picasso and Braque. (He was soon well enough established as a painter that six of his canvases were included in the Armory Show of 1913, which brought the work of the European avant...
These were the ladies who lunched in Douglas Sirk's 1950s "women's pictures" (magnificent obsession, all that heaven allows, imitation of life). Universal Studios decreed the improbable luxe of their suburban decor and the oversaturated colors of the films' palette. reviewers of the time dismissed these films (though audiences lapped them up), but over the years academics, feminist theorists and the ga-ga cinephile community have insisted on a re-evaluation. They see in Sirk's films' sympathy for his painfully repressed heroines a slyly subversive assault on the bland values that strangled them...
...edgy, absorbing movie Haynes has made. He is able to raise the melodramatic stakes. Yes, his Cathy (Julianne Moore) is drawn to her gardener (Dennis Haysbert) in the same way Jane Wyman once was to Rock Hudson. But he is now a black man, thus infinitely more threatening to suburban comity. Her husband (Dennis Quaid) is a workaholic, as emotionally absent as any Sirk hero. But he is also coming to belated terms with his long-closeted homosexuality. Haynes is opening issues here that '50s movies could only hint...
Speaking with students who did not grow up in the suburban, middle class backgrounds so common here, several were eager to describe the unique perspective they bring to Harvard. Lauren M. Goins ’04 from New Orleans, Louisiana offered an example of the experiences she has shared with classmates in her health policy section. “We talked about people who are uninsured,” she said. “But I spent all my life uninsured. I could never visit a doctor, I had to go to the emergency room...