Love, Regret, and Art: Pandemic Lessons from Station Eleven and The Real World
The three themes of lessons learned from HBO Max's Station Eleven are the same as the pandemic: love, regret, and art.

In late 18th-century Italy, in the mansion of Don Magnifico, the young and pretty Angelina works as a maid. Teased by her two frivolous half-sisters, Clorinda and Tisby, Angelina believes she is in love with a young valet and goes to the ball. Dressed in her finest finery, she meets the man who is in fact the Prince and flees from him after giving him a bracelet that will allow him to recognise her a little later. The masks come off, and kindness and love triumph! ‘La Cenerentola’ is the last opera buffa composed by Gioachino Rossini for an Italian audience. A dramma giocoso in two acts, with a libretto by Jacopo Ferretti, freely adapted from Charles Perrault’s fairy tale ‘Cinderella’ (1697), omitting the magic in favour of a realism tinged with humour and social criticism. Premiered for the Rome Carnival at the Teatro Valle in Rome on 28 January 1817. Recorded live at Glyndebourne Opera, Lewes, East Sussex, on 2 and 4 June 2005.
The three themes of lessons learned from HBO Max's Station Eleven are the same as the pandemic: love, regret, and art.
Tran Quoc Bao succeeds in telling us a story about martial arts, human decay, and friendship. The originality shown by his filmmaking is admirable and brings fresh air to the classic Chinese martial arts genre.
Is God Is tells a harrowing tale of retribution, sisterhood, and gender based violence. Far too eerie and clever to be an ordinary slasher, but too gory and merciless to be an ordinary thriller, Is God Is will appeal to the highbrow horror lover with generational trauma anywhere.
Ultra-violent storytelling has never been my thing, but the issues with Scarface go beyond that. The film perpetuates harmful stereotypes about Latinx immigrants and uses gore and misogyny for shock value that never serves any purpose. The whole venture is frustratingly empty, and left me desiring something more.
This year, in light of the pandemic and the inability to gather with our loved ones, a few of our staff members reviewed their favorite holiday films with the hope of recreating some of the sentimentality that reminds us of home.