Special Topics in Media

Send us Fan Mail This May, Special Topics in Media returns to a newer tradition, our "Student Spotlight Series". Last year, we examined a number of successful internship experiences shared by students in the Media Production and Communication program at MACU. This month, Garret sits down with key officers in the Communication and Media Club, starting with the current CMC President, and 2025-26 Communication Award recipient, Mia Haynes. Host: Garret Castleberry, Jacob Mallozzi (Guest) Produce...

Send us Fan Mail As our "Film Listology" season counts down the Top 100 films in the Listology Super Index, we rediscover a surprise import of international acclaim: Parasite, from Academy Award-winning writer-director Bong Joon Ho, in 2019. Parasite tells the story of families dueling for class status amidst the backdrop of modern Seoul, South Korea. Parasite presents itself as a family black dramedy, a social satire, and even a heist-horror. In essence, Joon Ho's work functio...

Send us Fan Mail In this "Film Listology" episode of Special Topics in Media, the dialogic duo wrangles with the impact of Fred Zinnemann's Academy Award-winning 1952 film, High Noon. This ideological Film Western stars Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Cain, the outgoing lawman of the small New Mexican town of Hadleyville. Marshal Cain relinquishes his badge in favor of domesticity, but when word that his feared foe, Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), is released from prison en route to the quiet ...

Send us Fan Mail Our "Film Listology" season continues with a surprise entrant in the #73 slot, from famed director Stanley Kubrick in 1975, Barry Lyndon. One could argue that Kubrick fuses a surrogate love letter to his never-filmed Napoleon Bonaparte biopic with a loose adaptation of the William Makepeace Thackeray novel, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. The result is as meditative and synchronic an examination into the spaces between love and loss, triumph and defeat, and possib...

Send us Fan Mail The "Film Listology" season continues with our #74 entry, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Released in 1939, Frank Capra directs Jimmy Stewart in this tale of an idealistic junior senator thrust into the cynical matrix of the Washington D. C. political establishment. Mr. Smith stands as a perennial "feel good" movie about how the American political system functions as the ultimate course corrective within an unjust world. But what happens if the film were to feel incre...