Posted on 09/18/2002 6:42:56 AM PDT by Lorenb420
THE Civil War ain't over yet, y'all, at least not according to the new Reese Witherspoon movie, "Sweet Home Alabama."
The Big Apple-bashing is as thick as Witherspoon's Southern drawl in this romantic comedy, opening Sept. 27, which boosts Dixie values by trodding on Yankee ones.
With the notable exception of a JFK Jr. clone played by Patrick Dempsey, nearly every New Yorker portrayed in this movie is either dishonest or moronic.
Gotham audiences surely will love the megalomaniac New York mayor and her crooked aides, the flaming gay best friend and the rooms full of empty-headed fashion types. What, no surly cab driver?
And Witherspoon plays an Alabama-born fashion designer who turns into a hideous brat when she moves to Manhattan.
But Witherspoon - who landed the plum role after "Legally Blonde" took off and Charlize Theron pulled out - claims the movie's not about bashing New York.
"My main concern was that the movie not represent Southern people in a way that I grew up looking at Southern people in movies - which is basically ignorant and inbred," said Witherspoon, 26, a Nashville native who lives in L.A. with her husband, actor Ryan Phillippe, and their 3-year-old daughter.
"I wanted to celebrate the eccentricities of Southern people - because there certainly is a lot of humor there - but also represent the values and morals they identify with," she said.
Witherspoon plays a designer pursued by the mayor's son (Dempsey). When he pops the question, he opens Tiffany's at night to offer her "any ring you want."
Before the invitations can be picked out, however, Witherspoon must first finagle a divorce from her long-estranged high-school-sweetheart husband (Josh Lucas) back in Alabama.
The South is lampooned at first - with its Civil War re-creationists and 'coon-dog cemeteries (no fooling).
But slowly its values reveal themselves as superior to the superficial values Witherspoon picks up in New York, where she learns to treat her old friends like "something she stepped in with those fancy shoes," as one puts it.
And let's not even talk about the morals of mayor Candice Bergen - the heroine's intended mother-in-law - who is obsessed with public opinion and with controlling her son.
"Sweet Home Alabama" did make one glowingly positive contribution to local culture.
Director Andy Tennant ("Anna and the King") filmed the New York segments during Fashion Week last year - just after Sept. 11 - heeding the real-life mayor's decree that the city remain "open for business."
New York is a net payor of federal taxes. Tax dollars earned on Wall Street go to pay federal aid to places like West Virginia.
Y'all cain't hide from me. I got an old girl friend stashed in Tuscaloosa, drive through Alabama about once every other year or less. And I know about the Alabama Hills and Signal Mountain, and I've heard about the little hidden valleys and hollers up in the mountains with their relict Pleistocene hardwood forests -- sugar maple, northern ash, that kind of thing. Been down to Bayou LaBatre, too, and I'll certify that it's just like Louisiana down there, except for the people. But it's coastal marsh, okay, and you can't tell it from St. Bernard Parish. Same shrimp boats, same crewboats, same offshore production platforms, same tidal channels and sawgrass. I went on vacation seven years ago, having just worn myself out traveling back and forth to a jackup out in Eugene Island ......and pulled into Dauphin Island marina aboard the ferry from the other side of Mobile Bay, and damn if that ferry didn't pull up right next to a big offshore crewboat that was a sister to, and identical in every respect but her name to, the crewboat I'd been riding on and off for five months out of Morgan City. Drove 450 miles to get away from work and the office, and kerplunk, landed right back in the middle of an oil-patch operating base.
Been to Orange Beach, too, and it's just like Fort Walton Beach. Got a little bit of a bunch of things going --- and that's not counting the kudzu.
Somebody commented that the bicoastal "blue" culture (which is based on the "Red/Blue" dichotomy someone popularized in an article, but which ought to reverse the colors) tends to dominate intellectual and upper-crusty values, which are liberal and statist (not to say internationalist and anti-American), but that popular culture is Southern, Western, "red" (Bush-friendly) and pervasive in more popular films, radio, popular music (all rock and roll and R&B and country is essentially Southern and country -- whether black or white people were singing and composing it), and popular books (like Tom Clancy's).
The values espoused in popular culture are conservative, Southern or Western, and the PC, Gorebot "blue meanies", no matter how much they try to control popular culture and its message, just sort of roll right off. I think it was Ben Stein who commented that, for all the liberalism of big Hollywood stars like Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn and Alec Baldwin, the people behind the camera actually tend to be conservatives who are trying to raise families.
We have a LOT of former New Yorkers-who try to make NJ "more like The City". ( You'll notice it's rarely called New York City : just " The City " - as if we were speaking of Thomas Aquinas' City of God .)
Actually, folks, I'm just striking back : All those years of jokes about " Joisey" on TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines, nightclub acts, etc., etc. DO eventually have some effect....
We can all thank Senator Byrd, the grandfather of pork barrel politics setting a fine example for the other elected crooks stealing taxpayers' money.
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