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Hollywood Babylon
The New American ^ | March 21, 2005 | William F. Jasper

Posted on 03/11/2005 11:00:10 AM PST by w6ai5q37b

The recent Academy Award celebration of last year's movie fare has made transparently obvious the huge chasm between the cultural elitists and Middle America.

The year 2004 is certain to go down as a defining point in the decades-long war for the heart, mind, and soul of America. The cultural elites who reign over the fields of entertainment, the arts, the news media, and academia are triumphantly celebrating our descent into a post-Christian, neopagan society. They are celebrating an ongoing revolution that threatens to transform a culture of life, light, virtue, and hope into a culture of death, darkness, degeneracy, and despair.

This celebration of our moral decline was nowhere more blatantly displayed than at the 77th Academy Awards on February 27. Considered by many to be the premier annual cultural event, broadcast to a global audience of hundreds of millions, the Oscars have been sliding down a slippery slope for many years. But this year's nominees for the coveted golden statue comprised, in the words of USA Today, an especially "bleak slate."

In a February 25 cover story entitled, "Exploring Oscar's Dark Side," USA Today described the grim reality behind this year's glamour and glitz:

Open the winning envelope? For this year's Oscar hopefuls, it's more like opening a vein. Drug addiction, mercy killing, mental illness, genocide, abortion, ill young mothers and borderline alcoholism — these are a few of Oscar's favorite things this year. Here are a few more of Oscar's favorite things, as deduced from the Academy's nominees: homosexuality, pederasty, adultery, pornography, nudity, incest, blasphemy, profanity, and Communist revolutionaries.

(Excerpt) Read more at thenewamerican.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: corruption; culturewars; hollyweird; hollywood; jbs; johnbirchsociety; morals; society; thenewamerican
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To: LogicalMs

I would hardly desribe Milius, Lucas, Spielberg and Scorsese as anti American.


101 posted on 03/12/2005 10:36:23 PM PST by Borges
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To: timtoews5292004
yep. did you do research papers on the movies in grad school and find those statistics, just like I did, too?

Heck, no. I read a great deal -- books, newspapers, magazines or the internet, or just plain talk to people.

Last year (?), a piece in The Wall St. Journal mentioned that studio execs claim that the "average" movie (however defined) only makes 30% of its take at the boxoffice. About 40% comes from DVDs, 15% from pay TV and the remaining 15% from other sources such as network TV. Just a few days ago I read somewhere that about 80% of Hollywood's revenues comes from DVDs and TV.

The majority of moviegoers are young men, so, not surprisingly, the studios cater to that demographic: they like loud, stupid and violent films. People who are 30+ have lose the habit of going to the movies and simply wait for the DVD or video to be released. I recently read somewhere that DVDs, unlike videos, are priced to sell and not to rent.

102 posted on 03/13/2005 8:07:50 AM PST by Siamese Princess
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To: Overtaxed

I forgot I just started watching it on TVLand. It had been a long time since I had watched it


106 posted on 03/13/2005 10:51:17 AM PST by mel
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To: mel

Those Cartwright Boys are the Kiss of Death. LOL!


107 posted on 03/13/2005 10:53:19 AM PST by Overtaxed (Well, at least it's whole wheat beer.)
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To: Siamese Princess

I wonder if that take can be broken down to only movies shown theatrically. It should be broken down to theatrically shown movies and straight to Skinemax movies.


108 posted on 03/13/2005 11:53:31 AM PST by Sam the Sham
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To: LogicalMs

Frankly, Milius completely and totally ripped off "The Battle of Algiers" for "Red Dawn". Even down to the character of the heroic Russian Spetsnaz commander vs the heroic French paratroop commander.

And as for Spielberg, it was he who in a way resurrected Disney. In "ET" he showed how it was possible to base a movie on children without being saccharine and schmaltzy.


109 posted on 03/13/2005 11:57:43 AM PST by Sam the Sham
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To: LogicalMs
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Lucas is the weakest of those mentioned. He's more of a special effects and production impresario then a director. Star Wars was a mix of Kurosawa, Tolkien, Arthurian Legends and Flash Gordon all reduced to anodyne cinematic wall paper. Though I've long realized that arguing with SW fanboys is a lost cause. :-) As a director Lucas has yet to top THX 1138 (shopworn as those ideas were even then). What is Coppola's 'view of the world'? If there's any constant in his work its nostalgic wistfulness and the primacy of family. What's wrong with that? Spielberg is a genius of pure film making. And his subjects and themes...WW2, the innocence of childhood, missing father figures...have been clear over the years. No one in the last 40 years or so has been able to capture the epiphanies of childhood with the magic that he has.
110 posted on 03/13/2005 3:52:21 PM PST by Borges
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To: LogicalMs
Aesthetics is ALWAYS a matter of opinion. Many films are lauded as "great" that I would have to be paid to watch. "Great" usually means that a herd of sheeplike critics have concurred that a film is great.

Relativsm! :-) Well of course it's a matter of opinion but there are standards agreed upon by a grat many critics and scholars. What 'overpraised' films would you say fall into this category? Citizen Kane? 8 /12, 2001? Those are some usual suspects. Just curious
111 posted on 03/13/2005 3:55:03 PM PST by Borges
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To: cookcounty

I'm telling you that you have missed alot. How do you know if you haven't seen anything? DUH.


112 posted on 03/13/2005 3:57:31 PM PST by Hildy
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To: LogicalMs
I saw Star Wars as a child and it did nothing for me. I watched it again recently and again it did nothing for me. What new ideas did Lucas present in it? It was entirely shopworn from start to finish. Including the ahem...metaphysics.

The spirtuality of the suburbs is what's new about Spielberg's films. What was once considered plastic and shallow he made seem alive and peotic in films like Close Encounters and E.T. Ray Bradbury has said that CE is one of his favorite films of all time. Schindler's List was a new way of depicting that subject in a non-documentary feature. It was much more complex then some people gave it credit for (which I admit is as much due to the script as to Spielberg). I never much agreed with Kael either.
115 posted on 03/13/2005 4:44:20 PM PST by Borges
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To: Borges

poetic not 'peotic'. Didn't want to hint at some drug reference!


116 posted on 03/13/2005 4:45:54 PM PST by Borges
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To: Borges
"Doesn't mention how the subjects dealt with. Or is it wrong to deal with them in any way?"

This is Hollywood we're talking about, do you have any doubts about how they deal with the things that are dear to them?

118 posted on 03/13/2005 5:03:12 PM PST by editor-surveyor (The Lord has given us President Bush; let's now turn this nation back to him)
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To: w6ai5q37b

Really? I thought we were winning. The awards show had the crappiest ratings since forever, and box office returns are pathetic.

But I'm an optimist. :P


119 posted on 03/13/2005 5:04:49 PM PST by Constantine XIII
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To: LogicalMs
OK if you're trumpeting the literary artistry of Rand then we have aesthetic chasms dividing us. BTW I heard she disliked that 1930s version of WTL. Ever see King Vidor's film of The Fountainhead? He turned it into a screaming Freudian melodrama. "I wish I'd never seen your skyscraper!"

I don't think great artists deal in fundamentals or general ideas they deal in specifics. I agree with Nabokov who said that the schoolmarm who pronounced that great art is 'simple and honest' should have been drummed out of the business. Everyone knows that great art is complex and deceitful. :-)

If you criticize 'Schindler's List' from a subject matter point of view then it's not worth discussing. It's about what it's about...an adaptation of a book about this particular guy and what he did. From what I've read about him he was actually more heroic then the film displayed...putting his life on the line every day and actively stepping in between Jewish workers and Nazis. It was an enthralling piece of filmmaking.
120 posted on 03/13/2005 5:11:16 PM PST by Borges
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