Miscellany Essays
Although not an immediate box-office success, A Bronx Tale (1993) was highly acclaimed by the film critics when it was released, and became a well-known classic, crossing the genres of mob movie, romance, coming-of-age, and historical drama. A Bronx Tale also went on to become a successful musical on Broadway. Chazz Palminteri originally wrote A Bronx Tale as a one-man play based on his childhood experience of seeing a man shot while sitting on his stoop. Performed in a small theatre on the West Coast in 1989, Palminteri narrated and showed his skill as an actor as he played all the characters’ voices and actions. His audiences soon became packed with A-listed actors and directors who vied for the film rights.
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In 1931, Aldous Huxley based the dystopian novel Brave New World, six hundred years in the future. In 1958, Huxley revisited the ideas of his novel in Brave New World Revisited: and concluded that his predictions could come to be in less than two hundred years. Current affairs over the last few years would suggest that Oscar Wilde may have been on to something when he proffered that, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
Film noir of the 1940s and 1950s in many ways empowered women by showing them making daring decisions that contradicted the projected roles that society wanted them to play. But the payback for the femme fatales of the era, dictated by the patriarchal society and censors, required them to pay for their crimes with their lives...Could the way we think and act as women, restrict our ability to create our own noir or will it always be dominated by the male perspective?