Posted on 07/25/2014 11:47:29 AM PDT by Kaslin
Social conservatives feel betrayed by the popular culture, and why not? If Hollywood depicts someone with a gun or a Bible, he's a figure of ridicule, entitled to say with Rodney Dangerfield: "I don't get no respect." (But Rodney's was an act, and he got paid for it.)
The coastal "sophisticates" mock the rubes, as in an episode on "True Blood," the HBO series with werewolves, vampires and theocratic bloodsuckers, which depicts two rich Republican stereotypes at a Ted Cruz fundraiser at the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas where a massacre follows. What fun.
Relief is at hand.
The new movie "Boyhood" gets to the heart and kidney level of experience, shunning the superficial overlay of cultural and political divides, moving instead to authentic love and affection in intimate family relationships that transmit family values from the inside out. A scene with a boy, a Bible and a gun becomes an understated milestone of growing up.
You could call this approach Tolstoy in Texas style, where unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, but share moments and episodes of happiness in their own way, too. Glib doesn't live here.
Movie director Richard Linklater, born in Houston and bred in East Texas where the Deep South begins to give way to the West, delivers a refreshingly different kind of story in his wonderful new movie set among his people and the places they live. He tells how he resents the way his people are portrayed as hicks and rubes, simplistic in the extreme. He reverses the course.
In a particularly touching scene, Mason, the protagonist played by Ellar Coltrane, celebrates his 15th birthday with his loving grandparents. The older country people give the boy his first Bible, with his name engraved on the cover and the words of Christ printed in red ink inside. He gets his first gun, ready for shooting the tin cans his grandfather throws in the air. The scene is shot lovingly, without judgment, reflecting love and the enduring rites of passage across the generations.
Linklater remembers a similar experience at 13 in his own life, which he calls his "redneck bar mitzvah." His grandmother gave him a Bible, too, because "she cared about my soul." He tells The Washington Post how his grandfather gave him the gun, that his father had given him, marking his passage to manhood. "They were sweet people," he says.
"Boyhood" was shot in real time, focusing on Mason as he marked the years from 6 to 18. His parents and his sister are portrayed in the same real time, and everyone ages, though the movie was shot from a script. It's a drama portraying real, live moments caught perfectly in the flux of time.
Polarization is the name of the game now in America, particularly in Washington with its fierce partisan fights over the social issues. That's not where most of us spend most of our time. Linklater reckons that many people grow up like he did, even if not in Texas, but with sensibilities of right and wrong similar to those he absorbed in shades of gray with occasional splotches of color, testimony to infinite variety -- some good, some not so good.
"Boyhood" is a coming-of-age of a boy, but it's the story of a family, too. In the heat of their youthful discovery of sex, his mother and father conceived a daughter and a son, but how each parent met the responsibility of raising the children changed them, too. This is generational change with more empathy than anger, more warmth than rebellion.
We get realistic insights into the lopsided challenges of divorce. Mason's single mother assumes the heavy lifting both at home and at work, while his single father is the jolly paternal playmate on weekends. The responsibilities are uneven, but so are the satisfactions. In a revelatory moment, after Mason's high school graduation, the father tells his mother what a good job of raising him she has done. The moment is neither sentimental nor a feminist rhetorical device, but a sensitive recognition of the differences in nurture and nature. In middle age his father becomes the man that Mason's mother had wanted him to be when he arrived on the scene in a flashy Pontiac GTO. He drives a minivan with his second family.
This is social politics told across the generations, up close and personal. Richard Linklater calls it a shame that the liberals dismissed the affections and loyalty of Southern white people over "the cultural divide of religion and guns." Bridging the divide requires "a little bit of understanding." He offers more than a little bit in "Boyhood."
It has been going on since at least the late 50s although it has heated up in the last few years.
I was watching one of my favorite shows yesterday or maybe the day before. Rockford was in prison and several guys were trying to kill him.
Then it struck me. Every single prisoner was White.
Similar stereotypes of the same type can be seen in just about 100% of modern TV shows, movies etc.
Someone is seriously putting oath a Richard Linklater work as conservative?
segregated prison?
The earlier post should be:
Someone is seriously putting FORTH a Richard Linklater work as conservative?
Read this:
“Richard Linklater calls it a shame that the liberals dismissed the affections and loyalty of Southern white people over “the cultural divide of religion and guns.” “
He’s complaining they don’t vote dem.
That must have been it. Rockford was White so they put him in a White prison. After all it was in a “Southern” California location.
ANYTHING that deals with America or western civilization has been re-scripted to present the west and Americans from America's very inception as nothing but a bunch of murderous, butchering, bigoted, slave-dealing,exploitive human parasites whose nations and cultures reflected those negatives.
At the same time, all societies and cultures NOT American or western have had all THEIR episodes of similar behavior washed from the narrative, briefly skimmed over, or excused in some other way. At the same time, the trivial contributions they have provided to our modern world have been magnified and praised, while those of the west have been diminished and condemned.
And our kids are exposed to this rubbish every day at school, in the movies, on TV and in those very publications.
Wow, sounds like a movie I’d actually pay to see.
I think you are actually understating the propaganda which now passes for entertainment, education etc.
It is the Design of the Progressives and the Cultural Marxists in 1930 (and John Dewey) to literally destroy Western Civilization and flip Good and Evil.
It was as Fichte stated and reiterated by Bertrand Russell: That children will have Free Will destroyed and that they will actually believe that snow is black.
Why do you think that facts and history mean nothing to liberals....you can’t “debate” with them because their brain is destroyed....they have no ability (no true knowledge) to think with.....nothing-—their brain is empty of anything worth “knowing”——it is filled with mush and emotions, conditioned to “feel” a certain way when a word is used (like Christian=Bigot, hater)-—where morality is only based on moral relativism: if it feels good, it is good.
It is called, “conditioning”-—just like they did with Pavlov’s Dog.
Those who control the words and language and images control the proper perception of the masses (public schools have been totally controlled since the 70s, with only a few teachers preventing the actual curricula indoctrination, but now Common Core destroys that escape, also).
If you allow kids to absorb TV-—Hollywood will control a lot of their emotions and worldview—perceptions of good and evil. It is a very Satanic worldview, since the 80s.
That is the exact description of what is happening.
“Pavlovian conditioning” and it is not complicated at all. In fact it is so simple everyone basically can understand it.
The trouble is those who don’t want to see what they are doing and just don’t care what the truth is.
For something texan and also good, I recommend the movie Seven Days in Utopia. It can be found on Netflix.
It is a story about a golf pro down on his luck and redemption in Utopia Texas where he meets some really good Christian people that lend a hand and straighten him out.
In a strange ending, you aren’t told if he made the final important putt. You are instead directed to a website to get the answer and view a redemptive video.
Strange but very good. Although about golf, it is not really about golf.
All very true.
We need a national association of conservative educators and knowledgeable people who can give re-education classes in western civilization and culture to kids under threat of modern Core Curriculum lobotomies. These could be offered evenings or weekends.
Right now, the future belongs to the leftists who monopolize the ‘educational’ establishment.
I still watch the RIFLEMAN. That show would never make it on the air today. First the name. Second they always talk about the good book.
What a great show. I always thought of it when I was raising my son.
History as the brain dead left WISHES it were with no connection to reality. Young people now know little to nothing of actual history. I am old enough now to see the process in action over my lifetime. Events that I lived through are being retold in a fantasy version that I know to be false because I was here. One of my favorite examples is all those who are now convinced that Richard Nixon WAS impeached and Bill Clinton WAS NOT. I know of nothing else that has been turned around so totally bass ackwards.
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