Posts by Dr. Sandra E. Cohen
LOVE ACTUALLY
Love’s Obstacles
How to Keep Hope Alive?
Richard Curtis’ 2003 film classic, Love Actually, is the ultimate Christmas ROM-COM. After all, the Christmas holiday-time is the season of love, romance, and family. But, what if you couldn’t be with family because of the pandemic? Or love isn’t working very well with the stresses of quarantine? Or maybe you’ve run into love’s inevitable…
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A FACE IN THE CROWD
6 Mistakes A Woman Makes
Falling for A “Bad Boy”
Lonesome Rhodes, a brashly-charming-drunken-drifter, is turned radio personality by Marcia Jeffries in Elia Kazan’s 1957 film, A Face in The Crowd. The film explores the climb to power of a rabble-rousing anti-social con man, as well as Lonesome’s ultimate tantruming downfall. Sound familiar? But perhaps the real question lies in why a woman like Marcia…
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MY OCTOPUS TEACHER
Healing Means
Returning To The Same Place
Why return to the same place over and over? It’s healing. How? Craig Foster says it best in his moving, life-altering, love-story, My Octopus Teacher: “That’s when you see the subtle differences. That’s when you get to know the wild.” It’s true, too, of going through a wildly tumultuous emotional time, not so different than…
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GET OUT
Trauma, #Never Again
& Getting Out
Jordan Peele’s brilliantly conceived film, Get Out, does its job of shattering the myth that we’re living in a post-racial America. My great uncle, Leo Hurwitz’s film, Strange Victory, did the same in 1948 after we won the war against Hitler but came home to racism here. It’s now 72 years later and there’s still…
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HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Family, Sibling Warfare & Love
Holidays are getting close and they’re complicated enough without COVID-19. Now you have to think twice (or, at least for different reasons) whether you can risk going Home for The Holidays. The usual question is: Do you want to go home to family, with all the quirks, neuroses, and old sibling warfare that Jodie Foster’s…
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THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)
A Narcissistic Mother & Her Child’s Soul
A narcissistic mother uses her children. She controls them, starves them of love. In John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), that’s Eleanor Shaw Iselin, Mother of lead character Raymond Shaw. Raymond is convinced: “I’m not lovable.” No wonder he has enough hate to be brainwashed to kill. “Yes, Mother,” “Yes, Ma’am, and “Yes, Sir” govern his…
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