I Don't Care About The Movies - Hate Mail

IN MY BRAWLS HERE over the years,  I noted that that distinguished American author whose magnum opus, Huckleberry Finn,  my generation was supposed to regard as THE GREAT 'MERICAN NOVEL, Mark Twain, was an extremely uneven writer producing, for the most part, crap.  All of his most notable novels are written from the point of view of a boy or, in one case, the book he wanted people to regard as his best,  a young girl AND EVEN THAT IS TOLD AS RECOLLECTED BY A LITTLE BOY sixty years later.  That book, Recollections of Joan of Arc, is not well regarded today, probably because of its positive treatment of religion,  but I think Twain wanted it to be his stab at writing an important adult book.   He claimed to have researched it for years, 

I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.

I deeply sympathize with Mark Twain, no doubt he was sick to death of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and the other (now entirely dated) humor that made him famous.   Of all his books,  and I went through the project of reading all of him available to me years ago, the one I still like and could imagine re-reading for pleasure, Life on the Mississippi,  was his attempt at good natured but not notably humorous realism.   I could imagine re-reading parts of Huckleberry Finn, the parts without the putrid Tom Sawyer in it,  with some pleasure though I don't think I would.   Why read that when you can read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman or Stephen Crane?

As to today's and yesterdays Twain schollars not liking it,  anyone who would have gone into a life study of Twain would have done so on the basis of his more typical production so it's not a big surprise they wouldn't like his project to escape those confines.   You usually judge an author on the basis of their typical and most lauded work, not on the outlier. 

So I don't think Stephen Spielberg's several attempts at adult movies makes up for the bulk of what he did in, along with so many others in Hollywood once the 1970s BLOCKBUSTER movie that you could get teenage boys to pay to see 37 times in the first run had become a thing, to end Hollywood's brief post-WWII attempt to make adult movies.   I've seen some of that and found it rather bland and sentimental.   I would much, much rather have seen what Stanley Kubrick was planning by way of a movie about the Holocaust than what Spielberg did.  I've read that Kubrick abandoned his project when Spielberg's Schindler's List was announced.   I do not regard it as in any way up to the topic, but, then, no movie could be what that movie is made out to be.   Kubrick's would probably not have been a big audience pleaser in the same way. 

I recently noted the great effect on American drama that the Yiddish Theater and the Federal Theater Project had had once those who were involved with those got to write plays, produce plays, act in them and also to make movies dominated the field.  Sidney Lumet's work  is an example of that trend which started stalling out in the mid 70s.   Just "The Hill" not one of his big movies proves that.    I don't have favorite directors but he might be the one I chose if I was forced to choose one. 

There were still adult movies being made and, I suppose, there still are but for the most part I don't want to sit through the months worth of dross to find the two hours of gems.   When I told my brother-in-law I didn't watch TV anymore he talked about this or that show that I was missing out on.   I told him if someone poured a bucket of quarters into a cesspool,  I wouldn't dive in to retrieve them.   I'd rather go looking at something that doesn't take as much time and where I can, generally, have more success at finding something worthwhile.   Besides, these days I'd have to subscribe to some scheme to see new movies and it's not worth it.   I'd rather look at the remnants of the Federal Theater Project and its offshoots that are available for free online,  and I don't mean War of the Worlds.   Though Welles was a product of that depression era project.