Agreed, although I did not care for Shane
If one wishes to see a fine film, they are now usually foreign, such as Das Boot or Breaker Morant.
Uh, those movies are now more than a quarter century old.
Watching any recent war movie (e.g., Iraq as the Rape of Nanking) is as if someone put uniforms on student protestors and told them to consult their professors for the impromptu script.
War movies are not very popular among anyone born from 1981 on, the demo that Hollywood wants to capture.
Something has happened to the generic American male accent.
IE the CALIFORNIA accent, that has exercised tyranny over (white) American English since the development of motion pictures and mass media. Actually, the bigger problem is the HOMOGENIZATION of regular speech patterns. People in Manhattan now aspire to the bland, generic, upper middle class white American accent that you hear in places like Littleton and Scottsdale.
Which leads to this:
We have given political eccentricity a bad name. There used to be all sorts of classy individualists, liberal and conservative alike
Because "regionalism" (which feeds individual idiosyncrasies) is under attack from the same upper middle class douchebags that are homogenizing our cities, our entertainment, and our speech patterns. Such (secular, educated) people frown on deviation from the norm/politically correct as much as the Holy Hosannah crowd used to frown on heathens.
For all the paranoia (usually coming from bland, Pete Wilson types) about America becoming more "diverse", the fact is that we are becoming more HOMOGENIZED, albeit split between a homogenized, bland PC upper middle/upper class and a pseudo macho/thuggish Prole and lumpen prole class with the same accents, tastes, styles of dress, etc. common among these two subgroups.
Am I alone in defending regional diversity against the homogenizing effects of mass culture, most of it emanating from the western part of the country?
I think he is more thinking of guys like Tim Robbins who uses a small snif-snif British accent even though he was born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley (east of L.A.) and has lived the rest of his life on So. Cal.
John Wayne, Bob Mitchum and others mentioned had their own unique accent and style — certainly NOT homogenized by any measure.