Politics' loss is society's gain as Sarah Palin stepped into her new career yesterday with "some straight talk" about the media and Hollywood.
"You represent," she told assembled journalists, "what could and should be a respected, honest profession, and what could and should be a cornerstone of our democracy--and that's why our troops are willing to die for you.
"So how about in honor of the American soldier you quit making things up?"
She also decried "anti-hunting, anti-Second Amendment circuses from Hollywood" that rely on "delicate, tiny celebrity starlets" to persecute peaceful gun owners with healthy appetites.
"Hollywood needs to know we eat, therefore, we hunt," she told a cheering crowd, including a woman in a red T-shirt reading "Palintologist," defining the profession as "someone who studies Palin and shares her conservative values, Maverick attitude and American style."
In these dark days, with America needing all the scholarship it can get, it comes as welcome news that Prof. Palin will be delivering her first lecture August 8th at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.
It would be a sign of scholarly solidarity if Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. left his quiet retreat in Cambridge to welcome her to Academia.
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Monday, July 27, 2009
Friday, October 19, 2007
Deborah Kerr
The woman who died this week was part of an American legend that will live forever in the Hollywood movies of the mid-twentieth century.
From the 1930s on, the studios there manufactured what John Updike has called “those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains project Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of the immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.”
Louis B. Mayer at MGM, the chief dream maker, son of a scrap-metal scavenger who became the most highly-paid man in the U.S., had an idealized vision of womanhood--beautiful, British and well-bred. He went to London and found Greer Garson to embody her in “Goodbye Mr. Chips,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Random Harvest,” “Mrs. Miniver” and “Madame Curie.”
After World War II, when Garson was becoming matronly, Mayer replaced her with Deborah Kerr, starting with “The Hucksters,” in which she played a high-born British widow who tames the American rough-and-readiness of Clark Gable.
Kerr kept playing the part with grace and wit until the early 1950s when Mayer lost control of the studio. She left MGM in 1953 to play an Army officer's alcoholic, sex-starved wife washed over by waves in the adulterous embrace of Burt Lancaster in “From Here to Eternity.”
American reality was changing, and so were the movies but, looking back, Mayer’s dream world had its charms, and Deborah Kerr was a lovely part of it.
From the 1930s on, the studios there manufactured what John Updike has called “those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains project Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of the immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.”
Louis B. Mayer at MGM, the chief dream maker, son of a scrap-metal scavenger who became the most highly-paid man in the U.S., had an idealized vision of womanhood--beautiful, British and well-bred. He went to London and found Greer Garson to embody her in “Goodbye Mr. Chips,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Random Harvest,” “Mrs. Miniver” and “Madame Curie.”
After World War II, when Garson was becoming matronly, Mayer replaced her with Deborah Kerr, starting with “The Hucksters,” in which she played a high-born British widow who tames the American rough-and-readiness of Clark Gable.
Kerr kept playing the part with grace and wit until the early 1950s when Mayer lost control of the studio. She left MGM in 1953 to play an Army officer's alcoholic, sex-starved wife washed over by waves in the adulterous embrace of Burt Lancaster in “From Here to Eternity.”
American reality was changing, and so were the movies but, looking back, Mayer’s dream world had its charms, and Deborah Kerr was a lovely part of it.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Truth-Tellers Who Lie
Brian De Palma has made a movie with images to “get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war."
He calls it “Redacted” to emphasize what the mainstream media has edited out of America’s picture of the war in Iraq. De Palma uses blogs, YouTube posts, videologs on the internet and the video diary of a soldier to convey the horrors of the Iraq war.
Only one tiny problem: The film, shown at the Venice Film Festival, is a “docudrama,” blending fictional techniques with all that unvarnished truth. "Everything that is in the movie,” he says, “is based on something I found that actually happened. But once I had put it in the script I would get a note from a lawyer saying you can't use that because it's real and we may get sued."
This is in the tradition of that other great Hollywood truth-teller, Oliver Stone, who filled the heads of a generation with his own paranoid fantasies about the death of a President in “JFK.” The truth ran a distant second to Stone’s inventions.
De Palma and Stone talk about art but their work is propaganda to blow-torch viewers’ minds. Kennedy’s assassination and the war in Iraq have left scars on the American psyche that are bad enough without the self-righteous, self-serving efforts of Hollywood “artists” to dig into them with their overheated imaginations.
Coppola told us truths about Vietnam in “Apocalypse Now,” but he didn’t call it journalism.
If the media have whitewashed Iraq, what purpose is served by a blackwashed version? Where are the shades of gray? If he read the polls, De Palma might see that most Americans don’t need him hammering at them to understand what has been going on in Iraq.
He calls it “Redacted” to emphasize what the mainstream media has edited out of America’s picture of the war in Iraq. De Palma uses blogs, YouTube posts, videologs on the internet and the video diary of a soldier to convey the horrors of the Iraq war.
Only one tiny problem: The film, shown at the Venice Film Festival, is a “docudrama,” blending fictional techniques with all that unvarnished truth. "Everything that is in the movie,” he says, “is based on something I found that actually happened. But once I had put it in the script I would get a note from a lawyer saying you can't use that because it's real and we may get sued."
This is in the tradition of that other great Hollywood truth-teller, Oliver Stone, who filled the heads of a generation with his own paranoid fantasies about the death of a President in “JFK.” The truth ran a distant second to Stone’s inventions.
De Palma and Stone talk about art but their work is propaganda to blow-torch viewers’ minds. Kennedy’s assassination and the war in Iraq have left scars on the American psyche that are bad enough without the self-righteous, self-serving efforts of Hollywood “artists” to dig into them with their overheated imaginations.
Coppola told us truths about Vietnam in “Apocalypse Now,” but he didn’t call it journalism.
If the media have whitewashed Iraq, what purpose is served by a blackwashed version? Where are the shades of gray? If he read the polls, De Palma might see that most Americans don’t need him hammering at them to understand what has been going on in Iraq.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Ugly Obsession: Seeing Through the Stars
Celebrity journalism has always been the ultimate oxymoron. Journalism is about truth, celebrity is illusion. But now neo-fan magazines and web sites have pushed the contradiction to a new level, seeking what Virginia Heffernan calls “evidence of monstrosity.”
The TV critic of the New York Times writes: “Like so many other 20th-century American institutions, Hollywood beauty is now regularly treated as a fairy tale only for dreamers and chumps. Readers with any sense are supposed to recognize its strategic function but otherwise acknowledge it as a lie. The availability of plastic surgery and the widespread use of tooth bleach and self-tanners and finally the photo manipulation that any grandma can do to brighten up her Canon PowerShot photos has somehow made even transcendent beauty manifestly suspect.”
Debunking beauty is surely satisfying to the mean-spirited and ugly of soul, but is that what’s become of all of us?
I take an old man’s pleasure in looking at Michelle Pfeiffer. Diane Lane and Scarlett Johansson, and no voyeur with a magnifying glass is going to take that away from me.
Heffernan ends up being of two minds about “dismantling fantasy,” but her analysis is devastating. She has been one of my favorite critics ever since she described me as an “ashen-faced talking head.”
The TV critic of the New York Times writes: “Like so many other 20th-century American institutions, Hollywood beauty is now regularly treated as a fairy tale only for dreamers and chumps. Readers with any sense are supposed to recognize its strategic function but otherwise acknowledge it as a lie. The availability of plastic surgery and the widespread use of tooth bleach and self-tanners and finally the photo manipulation that any grandma can do to brighten up her Canon PowerShot photos has somehow made even transcendent beauty manifestly suspect.”
Debunking beauty is surely satisfying to the mean-spirited and ugly of soul, but is that what’s become of all of us?
I take an old man’s pleasure in looking at Michelle Pfeiffer. Diane Lane and Scarlett Johansson, and no voyeur with a magnifying glass is going to take that away from me.
Heffernan ends up being of two minds about “dismantling fantasy,” but her analysis is devastating. She has been one of my favorite critics ever since she described me as an “ashen-faced talking head.”
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