Men

In her ongoing efforts to make Boston a city for everyone, today Mayor Michelle Wu announced the members of the Black Men & Boys Commission made up of ...

Additionally, BMA directs and supports the efforts of the Black Men and Boys Commission and My Brother’s Keeper Boston. For more information, please visit the BMA website. This July and August, the Commission will engage in a community listening tour to gather primary data about the issues facing Black men and boys from residents across Boston’s neighborhoods. The Commission will be housed within the Mayor’s Office For Black Male Advancement and consist of 21 members. My focus is to help build a better Boston that focuses not just on diversity and inclusion, but most importantly equity for our present and future Black citizens, leaders, and generations.” In 2021, a city ordinance, sponsored by City Councilor At-Large Julia Mejia, was passed to create a commission to study and address issues facing Boston’s Black men and boys. The Commission will be directly engaging with community members to address concerns through public meetings and a planned listening tour.

Attack on Titan has had a profound impact on the anime industry, but it's surprising to learn that it also pushed Annihilation and Ex Machina director Alex ...

Garland is a little concerned that people might overstate how much impact the anime series had on his work: “It would be getting something wrong to put too much attention on it in a big way,” he says. “There are Attack on Titan-like changes that continued to occur through the shooting process, or through the editing process,” he says. And when you get a jolt, you get a chance to step outside what you’ve been working on and thinking about, and kind of clear your head and start again and think not What was the idea I originally had? It’s so complex on so many levels, but in the Titans themselves, it did something really interesting — it takes human forms and makes slight changes that take things to the edge of ridiculous, but does it with real courage and confidence. After the film’s premiere, Polygon spoke with Garland about how he came to watch Attack on Titan and what it’s meant to him. The post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror series has had a huge impact on the anime industry, but no one was expecting the creator of such singular live-action American movies to cite the show as having an impact on his work.

The commission is made up of community leaders, experts, and residents who will work to support Black men and boys. Read more at Boston.com.

We are going to make sure the next generation and this current generation of Black men in the City of Boston feel secure, feel loved, and feel supported.” Later in the summer, the Commission will hold a community listening tour intended to gather data about the issues facing Black men and boys across Boston’s neighborhoods. “My focus is to help build a better Boston that focuses not just on diversity and inclusion, but most importantly equity for our present and future Black citizens, leaders, and generations.” The City of Boston is putting their money where their mouth is and we’re gonna make sure that it goes to where it needs to be going to. There’s only 21 commission members, but there’s plenty of work for everybody and it’s going to be collaborative, collective work that we are going to move and advance the lives of Black men and boys in the city.” “All 21 of these members are here because of their commitment and demonstrated leadership in uplifting, celebrating, supporting community and making sure we keep moving forward,” Wu said.

Alex Garland's newest film Men, starring Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear, gives birth to a stunning conclusion.

It is all part of how such terror is found everywhere with Garland showing how it is firmly embedded in institutions like the church and the police. In an interview with Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson, Garland said he views his films as a way for him to grapple with deeper themes and ideas “without sounding silly.” Elaborating, he said that he tries to “make the cases and the arguments within the films.” Men is the most explicit example of this in all his films to date as the ending sequence makes clear that he is arguing that the horrors of misogyny are born into each subsequent man to the point where they are indistinguishable from each other. That it all ends up coming back to James hammers this home further, revealing that Harper will never be able to escape his toxicity as it will only take the form of yet another man and continue to terrorize her. Even on what was supposed to be a vacation where she was left alone, Harper couldn’t run away from the all-encompassing reality of living in a male-dominated society. The impact comes from the tangible sense that something is wrong and that nothing can be done to escape it. Something that should be clear off the bat is that this did all actually happen. However, evidence is all pointing in the direction of this being something that was real. Seriously, this is your final warning as I am going to spoil everything that occurs at the end of the film. In the midst of this, Harper manages to stab the arm of one of the men when he stuck it through the mail slot on the door. Men tells the story of Jessie Buckley’s Harper, who decides to take a solo vacation to the peace and quiet of the English countryside. However, in the event you have not yet seen Men, best bookmark this page to come back later for an analysis of its conclusion. If you have come looking for answers to what on Earth that whole ending was about, you’re in the right place.

Jessie Buckley goes up against a multitasking Rory Kinnear in 'Men,' the latest mind-bender from the director of 'Ex Machina' and 'Annihilation.'

The #MeToo overtones are hard to miss, especially with the loathsome figure of Kinnear’s priest — a stand-in for every clergyman who’s ever turned to the cloth to bury his sexual desires, and also every religious institution that’s ever blamed a woman for her husband’s abuse. While “Men” shares plenty of thematic DNA with its predecessors, its gender politics are both more overt and more opaque. There’s the village priest who listens intently to Harper’s story before placing an unsolicited hand on her knee, and also the adolescent boy (Kinnear aided by some ingenious digital trickery) who verbally harasses her in a churchyard. (A lot of beauty too, courtesy of Rob Hardy’s sharp, crystalline photography and the doomy choral menace of Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s score.) Calling your movie “Men” might qualify as one such mind game, especially in the context of a story where men are total slime — quite literally, in the movie’s spectacularly gooey third act. The protagonist of “Men” is a woman.

With his latest film about a grieving woman stuck in a strange and dangerous place, Alex Garland wants to make you think and wince.

There’s a difference between being confrontational and achieving profundity, however, and the glib, sardonic humor present in Men’s earlier scenes manifests at the end in the form of a cosmic shrug. She’s an emotionally translucent actor, and as in her Oscar-nominated turn in The Lost Daughter—which, like Men, quotes from the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan—she’s able to convey complicated feelings in the space between words and facial expressions. In Antichrist, the vacationers are a husband and wife trying to cope with the death of their child and von Trier, one of the great sadists in contemporary world cinema, weaponizes their bucolic surroundings so that nature itself seems to be preying on their vulnerabilities and turning them against one another in a mythic battle of the sexes. For viewers in search of extremes, Garland delivers the goods: limbs are split; bodies well and mutate; taboos are skewered all over the place. If the ending of Men is meant to be funny, that mission is accomplished well enough. And while the makeup and CGI effects that occasionally transpose his face onto different characters within the same frame—including an entire pub’s worth of punters—are very effective, they’re meant to draw attention to Garland’s conceptual gambit rather than conceal it. More than anything, though, he’s after the shivery exhilaration native to the greatest thrillers—the sensation of scattered puzzle pieces locking into place, of reality peeling back its skin to reveal some deeper, hidden truth that’s been staring us in the face all along. The idea of a grieving character seeking relief in unfamiliar surroundings feels more than a little inspired by Roeg’s great occult shocker Don’t Look Now, and Garland also borrows liberally from Lars von Trier’s 2009 arthouse endurance test Antichrist—itself a fount of allusions to Roeg’s classic. James threatens to kill himself in response before punching Harper in the jaw on his way out of the apartment—and, seemingly, her life. More than anything, though, he’s after the shivery exhilaration native to the greatest thrillers—the sensation of scattered puzzle pieces locking into place, of reality peeling back its skin to reveal some deeper, hidden truth that’s been staring us in the face all along. It’s not really a spoiler to say that Kinnear plays multiple roles in Men: The trailer contains images of the actor in a half-dozen different guises. In a year that’s set to bring us a new film by David Cronenberg, the bar for body horror has already been set dauntingly high.

Jessie Buckley stars as a traumatized widow feeling menaced by a series of guys all played (brilliantly) by Rory Kinnear.

When the owner of the house, Geoffrey (Kinnear), shows up to make sure she’s settled in, he makes an awkward, Bible-referencing comment about her eating an apple from a tree on the property and is overly attentive as he gives her a tour of the place. Buckley’s Harper is haunted by slow-motion visions of her troubled and abusive husband James (Pappa Essiedu) leaping to his death from the top of their London apartment building; she was literally looking out the window as James was falling. There are times when “Men” comes across as being trippy and bizarre for the sake of easy scares, but thanks to Garland’s keen sense of pacing, the typically outstanding work from Jessie Buckley as our heroine and a staggeringly good, multi-character performance by Rory Kinnear, this is unlike any other film this year.

Seven were appointed by Mayor Michelle Wu, seven were selected from City Council recommendations, and seven were chosen from a pool of applicants. City leaders ...

The City Council passed the ordinance unanimously, but then-Mayor Martin J. Walsh vetoed it, saying the commission would “duplicate and complicate efforts that my administration is already engaged in.” Starting June 1, the commission will meet in Nubian Square on the first Wednesday of every month, and it will soon kick off a community listening tour, Wu said. - James Morton - CEO of the YMCA of Greater Boston They’ll design and promote programs that supplement the city’s existing work — which we will fund.” Because we are the men who built this country, built this city, and we will be the men who are restored back into our neighborhoods, back into our communities, and back into our families, to uplift them.” Selected from over 300 hopefuls, the commission members are students, attorneys, community and neighborhood leaders, former elected officials, and higher education administrators.

You are unlikely to find a ghastly Gothic freak-show more out there than Alex Garland's “Men,” a woman-on-her-own thriller.

“Men” is a kind of flawed “Repulsion” for our times. I was confused about why Harper hadn’t noticed the most obvious thing about the men in “Men.” When she also doesn’t acknowledge the hand on her knee, I started to lose interest. Things get out of control conceptually when Harper visits the town pub, where several men are gathered and you think you might be watching a bad “SNL” skit. Suddenly, Harper sees a figure at the other end of the tunnel. “Men” is a film about how guilt undermines mental health. Arriving at the house, Harper picks an apple from a tree and takes a bite out of it.

Alex Garland has a way of crafting intricate, off-the-wall films whose impressive atmospheric tensions tend to outweigh what's actually taking place in them ...

It carries, in its cinematic DNA, more than a passing similarity to Darren Aronofsky's equally manic "Mother!," a film that indicts its own creator in the process of representing female oppression from churning male need, but whereas that film burnt itself to the ground (fittingly) in its searing final act, Garland contents himself with a series of graphic birthing scenes, and a culminating presentation that more resembles a modern dance choreography than moving narrative arc. But the last act of the film, whereupon Harper's (and our own) grip on reality gets distorted to the point where everything plays out as an artist's treatise on guilt as naked as the imploring men who readily appear before her, loses coherency as it moves farther away from where it started. From that point on, nearly everything Harper experiences in the town is increasingly creepy and peculiar: She tours the local parish, gets cursed at by a disturbed teen, and spills her guts to the vicar (also Rory Kinnear), only to have the man put his hand on her thigh, and suggest the death of her ex-husband was entirely her fault. After taking the grand tour from the homeowner, a peculiar but seemingly harmless man named Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), Harper goes on a walk in the beautiful English countryside, with its blankets of lavender and verdant fields, a smile emerging on her face. As with most of Garland's work, the narrative begins on concrete terra firma: A young Londoner named Harper (Jessie Buckley), attempting to recover from an awful trauma -- her former husband James (Paapa Essiedu), a troubled man with whom she was in the process of leaving, plunged off their London high-rise in response -- books a grand country manor for a fortnight in an attempt to heal herself. The opening scene, in the seconds before her husband plunges past Harper as she's looking out the window, generates more emotional pitch in 30 seconds of screen time than many films accomplish in two hours.

The three referees and three assistant referees are the first to be picked for the top men's soccer tournament, which will be held in Qatar this year.

That the opportunity for the first female officials to take part in a World Cup is taking place in a conservative Gulf state like Qatar adds to the intrigue. “Each match official will be carefully monitored in the next months with a final assessment on technical, physical and medical aspects to be made shortly before the World Cup,” Massimo Busacca, FIFA’s director of refereeing, said. “The message is clear: Don’t rest on your laurels, keep working hard, and prepare yourselves very seriously for the World Cup.” For that reason, FIFA said the teams at the controls are mainly drawn from Europe and South America. “I would hope that in the future, the selection of elite women’s match officials for important men’s competitions will be perceived as something normal and no longer as sensational,” he said. The most likely candidate among the three to get a starring role is Stéphanie Frappart of France, who has broken a number of barriers in European soccer.

Women referees will make World Cup history this year by officiating games at a major men's tournament for the first time in Qatar.

She also refereed the final of the men's French Cup this month. About 30 minutes after the match, officials ordered the teams back on the field to restart play, but Tunisia refused. French referee Stephanie Frappart officiated men's games in World Cup qualifying and the Champions League, after handling the 2019 Women's World Cup final.