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 ...
If you went to this movie to learn more about drugs than that they're bad, of course you're going to be disappointed. But that was not the point; by that logic, we never have to watch another Jesus film because the message is that Jesus was good, or an action film, because they say nothing more than "good guys win" or whatever. And we can never have another romantic comedy or horror film, either.
RFAD was very insightful as to a specific kind of drug addiction; it has as much to do with Panic and FC2 as it does with The Passion or Star Wars. It's OK not to like it, but to criticize it for something it wasn't trying to be isn't very plausible.
But conservative Hollywood kept trying with one Julie Andrews musical after another and more big budget historical epics ("Battle of the Bulge", "Tora, Tora, Tora", although they struck gold with "Patton"). Poor Darryl Zanuck couldn't make a star out of his squeeze Irina Demick or dig himself out of "Cleopatra". Was there a Broadway musical they left unfilmed ? The Right lost control of Hollywood because they lost their audience with the collapse of the family market.
I wonder though, whether the moralistic Irwin Allen disaster movie was a continuation of the Biblical epic. Didn't they all have a "Jeremiah" scene where the prophet pleads with them to follow him to the truth but the crowd angrily refuses (like when they wouldn't climb the Christmas tree out of the ballroom) and is smitten for their sin ?
DePalma directed Scarface which trashed Castro and his ilk pretty good. Tony Montana said, "How would you like leeving someplace where they are always telling you what to do and how to theenk?"
I should have made it clear that I meant the material is from the same period as those other films I mentioned. The novel was published in the early 1970s. It boils down to a question of whether I would ever want to watch it again. A great tragedy should hold up to this. It didn't induce any catharsis for me and wouldn't have any futher appeal. Just the memory of sitting through it and wincing.
Scarface of course being written by Oliver Stone! Talk about irony.
Ironically those 70s diaster movies were the last refuge for old Hollywood stars. Hey look it's Helen Hayes! It's Ernest Borgnine!
I've been to 3 R-rated movies in 15 years. Saving Private Ryan, Schindlers List and teh Colopr Purple. I don't think I've missed a thing. And I've saved a lot of money.
OK. twenty years, then. Even better.
Ever listen to a piece of music more then once? Or look at a painting? Read a book more then once? It's the same thing. Great art doesn't grow old and presents something new everytime you engage it.
teeny boppers spending their parents money for 10-15 visits to see Leo DiCaprio in Titanic is why it is #1 in box office grosses today.
They lost the family market when they switched from following the Hays code and went to the letter-based rating system.
Yes but it was conservative Hollywood that made the disaster movies. Remember how incredibly moralistic they were. They were like the Aaron Spelling TV shows of the time providing gigs for washed up movie stars.
What happenned in Hollywood was simple. The educated baby boom generation had European tastes. It replicated Monty Python in Saturday Night Live. It replicated the European art house auteurs like Bergman or Truffaut in Scorsese, Bogdanovich, or Coppola. It replicated "The Forsyte Saga" and the heyday of Mahsterpiece Theatre with the miniseries of the 70's and 80's.
Glad you agree.
And Truffaut and the French New Wave guys worshipped the old Hollywood directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks and reinterpreted the old american genres in their own way. And Coppola, Scorsese and the rest were responding to that re-inteppertation. It can be very confusing. :-)
But there was no family market during the 70's. Hollywood spent a ton of money trying to find it and it wasn't there. College age baby boomers were the market then.
The success of James Bond, Dirty Harry, and the spaghetti westerns showed that audiences were fed up with boy scout heroes let the bad guy get off the first shot. Near the end of his career we had John Wayne vainly trying to become Clint Eastwood in "McQ".
Movies about children were commerically moribund since the early 60s. E.T. was the first one to have any success since then.
And I said they were???
Yeah, but the Duke ended it playing his ol' self in the excellent The Shootist.
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