Kinsey is a story about learning, about Kinsey's study of the human animal. Superb performances abound, particularly from Liam Neeson and Laura Linney. The period feel of the film is very convincing, and it is well-crafted and beautifully photographed. Mechanically it is of high quality, but the thing that makes it a great film is its message. This is also precisely what makes people give it and other current films that contain a message an artificial "1" rating - because they don't agree with the message.
Knowledge that there were people trying to dissuade me from seeing this film made me want to see it that much more. This echoes the idea that Kinsey states in class - that an impulse restricted long enough becomes an obsession. I think this also applies to the quest for knowledge. Case in point - banning something tends to make it more popular.
This film is a ray of light in a nation of increasing homophobia, censorship, forced ignorance and fundamentalist de-evolutionary ideology. It's disturbing to see the same patterns being repeated today - seeing the lengths people were (and still are) willing to go to prevent us from learning more about ourselves.
That theme was central to the film, but not overtly so. The viewer gets the idea subtly from the events and alignments of Kinsey's detractors (Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover being the two most well-known) and the arguments they provide against the research he did. Even today, detractors concentrate on the information he provided outside of the scientific analytical context in which it was generated. He was simply compiling information, and for the analysis and presentation of that information many would "shoot the messenger".
Knowledge that there were people trying to dissuade me from seeing this film made me want to see it that much more. This echoes the idea that Kinsey states in class - that an impulse restricted long enough becomes an obsession. I think this also applies to the quest for knowledge. Case in point - banning something tends to make it more popular.
This film is a ray of light in a nation of increasing homophobia, censorship, forced ignorance and fundamentalist de-evolutionary ideology. It's disturbing to see the same patterns being repeated today - seeing the lengths people were (and still are) willing to go to prevent us from learning more about ourselves.
That theme was central to the film, but not overtly so. The viewer gets the idea subtly from the events and alignments of Kinsey's detractors (Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover being the two most well-known) and the arguments they provide against the research he did. Even today, detractors concentrate on the information he provided outside of the scientific analytical context in which it was generated. He was simply compiling information, and for the analysis and presentation of that information many would "shoot the messenger".