On Thu, 11 Jul 2002 10:57:38 -0700 skip Heller wrote:
on 7/11/02 10:31 AM, Patrice L. Roussel at proussel@ichips.intel.com wrote:
When is this stupid cliche of America having no culture will stop? There is almost not a trend these days that does not originate there. And what can the old world do when most of its youth espouses uncritically anything coming out of the States?
It's a tough question when your chief cultural exports are movies in the Stallone style, food in the McDonald's style, and music in the Spears style.
Why always taking the worst examples? US has produced many talented commercial successes (Dylan, Prince, Madonna, etc). When Hollywood made the movies that are almost acknowledged now as the masterpieces of the genre (and let's limit ourselves to the '40s and '50s to avoid controversy), do you really believe that they were targetting the intellectuals and happy few? These movies were popular successes that we now consider as masterpieces. Our obsession with the obscure, the challenging, etc (and I know that you, Skip, do not belong to that category) makes us forget how much durable talent can hide behind something that appears as mundane at first (and how the new punch-in-the-face can quickly become jaded and tiring). It is Hitchcock who said (from memory): If a blank canvas cost millions of dollars, brushes and color tubes as much, we would have a different outlook at artistic freedom. That could explain why old Hollywood movies were so good in average (I guess because these huge sums of money were put in the hands of people who had proven a minimum of craftmanship). But we can wonder, just for fun, if we are not missing something unique: an experimental movie director with a Hollywood budget. Patrice.