Posted on 01/13/2004 2:37:26 PM PST by quidnunc
You usually hear the tune on Oscar night, but not often the lyric, which is more to the point:
Hooray For Hollywood
Where youre terrific if youre even good.
When someones really terrific, its a different story. In a town where everyone from Johnny Depp to Janeane Garofalo is an artist, Hollywood doesnt always know how to deal with the real thing. In 1996, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, mulling over their Career Achievement Award, decided to reject Elia Kazan and honour instead Roger Corman, the director of Swamp Women, Attack Of The Crab Monsters and Teenage Caveman. Swamp Women and Attack Of The Crab Monsters are good, and Teenage Caveman is not only good, its also an eloquent plea for world disarmament, at least according to its youthful star Robert Vaughan. But On The Waterfront is terrific. This should not be a difficult call.
But apparently it is. Kazan can make a claim to be the father of modern American acting, the man who brought Stanislavskian techniques to Broadway and then to the silver screen. Insofar as the young lions of our present-tense culture aspire to emulate any of the old guys, its not David Niven or even Jimmy Cagney who resonate, but Marlon Brando, James Dean, Rod Steiger on all of whom Kazan was the greatest single influence. He was a great theatre director, and later a fine novelist, and, when he walked on stage in 1999 to receive a belated Lifetime Achievement Oscar, he might reasonably have expected the orchestra to be vamping Leonard Bernsteins theme to On The Waterfront for a good ten minutes while Hollywood roared its appreciation. Instead, outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, elderly hack screenwriters led protests and, inside, the likes of Sean Penn sat on their hands. For both Hollywoods ancient D-list Communists and its A-list anti-anti-Communists, theres only one thing about Kazan that matters: he named names.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
For the record, your argument would be more effective if you used Carl Orff in place of Richard Wagner.
Dancing is simply a pointless waste of time and energy, since you were obviously seeking out my expertise.
You cannot listen to Madonna's "music" without including the baggage of her various media stunts. It's all part of the performance.
Further, there is very little high art anymore. Anything resembling high art is thoroughly corrupted by the most banal political view these days, not even high-level intellectual ideology.
A great point, one never hears from Hollywood:
the fact that Hollywoods belief in its own heroism derives from a moment of colossal Hollywood cowardice any obstacle. The blacklist victims werent blacklisted by the government but by the studios Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney the same folks who run Hollywood today.
This is the point that the liberals in Hollywood conveniently fail to ever mention. The United States government NEVER blacklisted ANYONE.
Gee what an enormous number...I can hardly imagine it.
So we should ignore him because of that. How many evil men does each generation produce? Maybe we should ignore them also?
He's only on your list because of his defense of the Gulag.
So you claim to be a mind-reader? There a talent I can safely ignore.
I chose Wagner because his music was banned in Israel...until musicians realized how foolish that was.
Dancing is simply a pointless waste of time and energy, since you were obviously seeking out my expertise
On this I yield to superior wisdom. :)
I don't know about God but I do. You mean you don't?
Sssstttreetchhhhh...........
Idiotic beyond belief. You can find exression of such in every art form.
I should have added "...in New Jersey alone." Do search on the Rutgers website for "Paul Robeson".
So we should ignore him because of that. How many evil men does each generation produce? Maybe we should ignore them also?
As a mathematician, I have high standards for who makes it into the history books. The fact is, P.R. does not "rise to the level" of getting any attention paid to him by history -- except for his politics.
So you claim to be a mind-reader? There a talent I can safely ignore.
Oh, to the contrary, the point I was making was not that you listed him because you liked his politics but that you had only heard of him because of his politics.
Exhibit #1: Jonathan Swift
Exhibit #2: Miguel de Cervantes
Come on, elephant dung has become a standard part of the palette.
Only for dung lovers. Try this
So Robeson was before your time. Guess what, so was Enrico Caruso. Caruso was far more important in a historical sense because he came at the time recorded music first emerged.
If you think anyone will discuss Pavarotti in 50 years, you're mistaken. Except, of course, to explain to future generations that he was like whomever is the popular singer of that day.
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