Question: Why are actresses playing transsexuals in movies lately? First Felicity Huffman and now possibly Catherine Zeta-Jones. I think it's completely ridiculous/offensive that these roles aren't being cast with actual transsexual actors. Not only would that be a wonderful way to represent more diversity in Hollywood, but it makes sense to cast someone whose own life is the same as the character's. Being a transsexual is not a mere lifestyle choice that an actor can emulate; it's a gender. This new trend is like having a man play a woman, a woman play a man or even having one race play another — a practice I thought had finally left Hollywood.Answer: First, I need to point out that even by the laziest J-school standards, it takes three instances to make a trend. Right now we've got one confirmed instance — Felicity Huffman as a fictional pre-op transsexual in Transamerica
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Question: I recently saw and loved the movie Crash, and was especially intrigued by the way all the stories intersected and converged. Could you possibly give me a list of some other films whose stories are structured in the same way? Answer: I certainly can: First, for the benefit of readers who haven't seen Crash (2005), its structure is one in which multiple narratives are developed simultaneously and overlay or intersect at key points before converging at the end. Unlike ensemble movies in which there's a main plot and a series of subplots, films like this give more or less equal weight to all the story strands and derive a significant part of their thematic power from the apparently random way in which different characters' destinies come together. To my mind, the greatest of all multiple-story narratives is
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