Friday, October 31, 2008

Just about right ...

... The Reel Thing.

I couldn't agree more about Rain Man. What a god-awful movie. And I think Mad magazine nailed Kramer vs. Kramer with its parody: Crymore vs. Crymore. I don't find The Seventh Seal ponderous, but I do think he's right about Les Enfant du Paradis and Fred MacMurray (how about Fred in The Apartment?).
Then there's this:
The college seniors in a UCLA seminar I recently taught fancy themselves sophisticated filmgoers, but haven’t seen Grand Illusion, Chinatown, or a single John Ford, Cary Grant, or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. Urbane newspaper readers, as Thomson bemoans, deem Cinema Paradiso the best foreign-language movie ever made—because they’ve seen it, and don’t know its betters (“if you haven’t read much else, then Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger may be the best book you’ve ever read”).
I have long worried that many among the young, thanks to poor instruction in history and geography, cannot properly orient themselves in time and space. (I know: I'm sounding old and cranky. Well, I am old.)

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