Page 4 - Ben Beard News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

An organic compound that makes ticks "twitch to death" may offer the relief that tick magnets like Sam Venable have been seeking.

Movies about the South should help us atone and come to terms with our past, author says AL.com 1 hr ago Ben Flanagan, al.com From “The Birth of a Nation” to “Forrest Gump,” American filmmakers remain fascinated by the South, while the people actually born and raised in the region yearn to see the place depicted with at least a dollop of authenticity. But we’re too often served crummy accents and corny gimmicks, not to mention dated tropes that render the films problematic through a modern lens. A deeper dive into Hollywood’s attempts at understanding and portray...

4:00   Such a mass of material must of course be arranged, somehow. Not all films get or deserve equal time.  A good deal of the book is arranged by state, but Beard begins with chapters on “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone with the Wind,” two powerful films that set the South in the minds of millions of Americans, for better or worse.  Choose worse.   “The Birth of a Nation” is the first important American film—"for its technique and brio, but also for its politics and lies,” Beard tells us. The film depicts a Reconstruction of “Black corruption...

Published: 21 December 2020 What can we learn from the Southern films of the past? What can be done in the future to make new ones as multidimensional and as vast as the region really is? Last week on Watching America, Dr. Alan Campbell chats with author and film fanatic Ben Beard about his new book, The South Never Plays Itself: A Film Buff's Journey Through the South on Screen, and more.The film industry's idea of the South never seems to capture the true complexities, differences, and beauties that it holds. Beard and Campbell take a trip through time to discuss some of the gen...