Featured Essays
Coming to Terms
by Isaiah Speller Henry King's The Gunfighter (1950) encapsulates one's deviation from being good and facing fatal consequences. Cowboys in earlier Westerns were portrayed as heroes who followed an honorable...
Meta-Media Cinema Series
Research shows that mass media has a significant impact on the career aspirations of college students, and in particular, the aspirations of minority students. (Cooper, 2013) While television, newspapers and social media outlets are frequently used...
Nostalgia and Social Justice: The Cinema of Orson Welles
by Veronica Boscia During a 1938 radio broadcast, Orson Welles stated “Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of a failure with a death in it. There is more lost paradise in them than defeat.” Welles tells these stories brilliantly...
Student Screenwriting Competition 2021 Winners
Winners of the first-ever Mercy CATA Student Screenwriting Competition have been selected! Winning Screenplay Reginald Agossa – The Incredibly Overwhelmingly Taxing Love Life of a 20 Something Superhero Runners-Up Tommie Cruz – Pillside Pharmacy...
Blood and Chains, New and Old
by Gordon Ward The cronut is a wondrous invention. Chef Dominique Ansel was a mad genius to think of combining the buttery flaky makeup of a croissant with the frying process of a doughnut. It takes a true visionary to combine two very different...
Bela Lugosi
by Johane Nozier It was a grim period for America during 1931 (Matthews, 2009, pg. 5). The Great Depression, the biggest economic crisis in the country's history, had negative effects throughout the land. Dracula (1931) was a perfect metaphor for...
Rediscovering The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
by Cecilie Stenak In Tobe Hooper’s horror film, the viewer follows a group of friends who are on their way to visit an old homestead in Texas. What they thought was going to be a fun road trip ends up being a bloody, macabre and ungracious journey...
Bridesmaids and the Elements of Comic Stories
by Alyssa RodriguezThe most successful comedies follow a formula known as THREES. These 6 essential ingredients for humor include a Target, Hostility, Realism, Exaggeration, Emotion, and Surprise. Paul Feig’s 2011 romantic comedy Bridesmaids...
Thematic Elements and Tone in The Gods Must Be Crazy and Dust Devil
by Michael Dunnings The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), directed by Jamie Uys and Dust Devil (1992), directed by Richard Stanley, are two films that, while similar in certain themes and settings, differ dramatically in approach. The Gods Must Be Crazy...