radman wrote:
radman says:
anybody else see this thing? is it really that bad?
No, but when I see a quote like this from the review
>you not only know what's going to happen, you're already
>wincing at how trite it all seems.
it reminds me once again of a theme that surfaced in this group way back
in the 1990s: the relative
paucity of powerful films (fiction, too) dealing with the era. This
hasn't been a problem where the
war is concerned since war narratives have inherent power. But when
literature or film turns to the
broader Dionysian aspects of the sixties--the power of which took so
many different manifestations,
and the remembrance of which is arguably a key reason people frequent a
group like this--things
often seem to ring hollow. Rob Cohen's A Small Circle of Friends? . .
.Stone's The Doors? The NBC TV-Movie The Sixties?
Seems to me that the most powerful cinematic treatments of the sixties
deal with the era in hindsight
rather than "in the moment", as in Karel Reisz's excellent adaptation of
Dog Soldiers (Who'll Stop
the Rain), which views the Kesey era from the jaded vantage point of
late Vietnam. Or even
Soderbergh's quite recent The Limey, the sixties theme in which is also
handled in hindsight. Of
course, these are exercises in anti-nostalgia, and it says something,
too, that jaded treatements seem
more powerful than innocent ones.
Jeff Apfel
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 02 2000 - 19:09:25 CUT