steve simelsAugust 5, 2016 at 9:18 PM
"
I don't much care for most Hollywood movies. They're crap. "
Which is the equivalent of saying 'I don't care for most novels in English."
Or dissing any other art form.
You're a philistine snob asshole.
The Thought CriminalAugust 6, 2016 at 6:12 AM
Preferring reality to Hollywood lies makes someone a "philistine snob asshole", you've got a lot more in common with the Trump voter than you would ever like anyone to have noticed, but I just did.
Here is more on how Hollywood style falsification of reality is destroying democracy.
“He was always a narcissist, you can see that,” says Bill Pruitt, producer on Seasons 1 and 2 of The Apprentice, and later a producer on the reality shows The Amazing Race and Deadliest Catch. “But on the TV show, what you didn’t see, what we saw, was the evolution of a storyteller. You could see how keenly aware Trump became of the story he was telling as it was shaped by the producers around him—of Omarosa’s decline, or Bill Rancic’s rise to glory. Reality TV is the public pillory now, the grand coliseum where we give the big thumbs up or thumbs down. And it shaped him.”
“I’ve been struggling with the whole experience of watching Trump go from punch line to GOP nominee,” Pruitt says, “because of how it reflects on reality TV, which is the work I’ve been dedicating my life to for the last 10 years. The associations are glaring. Those in our business who hadn’t already taken stock of what we wrought, we’re doing it now. I might have signed an NDA back in the day that would allow someone to come after me, but I feel almost a patriotic duty to talk about this.
“Those of us involved in the show are proud of our work. But we might have given the guy a platform and created this candidate. It’s guys like him, narcissists with dark Machiavellian traits, who dominate in our culture, on TV, and in the political realm. It can be dangerous when we confuse stories we’re told with reality. We need to wake up—and that’s from someone who helped tell these stories.”
There you have it from one of the biggest producers of entertainment TV's ersatz "reality" and its relationship to the nightmare possibility that we might have a fascist 2-year-old in a 70-year-old with the libidinous imagination of a 12-year-old asshole as president and at least a quarter to a third of the American People mistaking that as a good idea.
The insanity of gun culture in the United States, the political pressure to have the most insane gun laws in the developed world is intimately tied to the lied-up old west of Hollywood Movies. If that bull shit had been limited to those who read dime-store novels instead of the massive movie audience and the even bigger audience for the same crap on American TV, that insanity would almost certainly never have taken hold. Combined with the fascism that has been promoted in the American entertainment industry, it is incredibly dangerous. Those weapons aren't 19th century Colt six-shooters, they're automatics with modern ammunition.
An actual fascist as president - not to mention the many actual fascists already in the Congress, governorships and state legislatures and appointed to the Courts on both the Federal and state levels, devolving down to the quality of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or name your nightmare governor already in the executive, that is too high a price to pay so that TV executives and owners can make money on peddling lies.
Who are you are you going to believe on this, your own eyes or a 12-year-old in a c. 70 year old body or a 90 year old former scribbler for the Village Voice who now does his scribbling for the Koch bros. at the Cato Institute?
I am convinced by observing the decline, especially in the period since Ronald Reagan got so much traction from parroting Dirty Harry that putting the privileges of the media over the exigencies of us having a population able to cast an accurately informed vote WITH GOOD WILL is where this started. You can have the freedom to tell the truth, absolutely while discouraging lies. There is a real, dispositive and inescapably consequential result from enabling lies and the liars who tell them. Even if we dodge the giant bullet from the giant potency aid and ultimate phallic symbol of Hollywood movie illusion, there is no guarantee that another Trump in twelve or twenty-four years won't have 49 or 51 % of the voters "make his day". I doubt anyone is going to learn that real, dispositive and inescapably consequential lesson from this wake up call because the slogans "free speech" "free press" in their heavily promoted absolutist form will prevent them from thinking those thoughts.
What if it turns out that the "free press" industry, the "more speech" line peddlers and the such are wrong and democracy can't survive on the regime of lies they have enabled? If, as I suspect, they are wrong and democracy can't survive when the people are corrupted with ideological lines in popular entertainment and the kind of false history that they get from movies, TV mini-series, alleged TV news and hate-talk radio, the choice between that and democracy is inescapable. We won't be able to have it both ways and anyone who thinks seriously about why the United States, the cradle in which real, egalitarian democracy was being nurtured has given way to producing Trump voters will have to face the fact that it is what informs their minds that has produced their ideas and actions. Those things they saw on TV and in the movies and heard on hate-talk radio really did have a real and deadly effect. Only it's produced a Trump as it had produced a Bush II a Ronald Reagan and a Nixon who went on Laugh-In and said "Sock it to me?" as he won the election.
Trading solely on my experience of several years working in bookstores selling books, but most novels in English are crap, too.
ReplyDeleteIf every novel was excellent, outstanding, truly a work of art for the ages!, then no novel would rise above the crowd and be memorable. It's as simple as the top 10% of a graduating class get all the job offers because, being the top 10%, they are the "best."
But without the bottom 90%, they're nothing.
To even try to argue that all novels in English (what, Russian, French, German, and Italian novels are all crap?) is itself crap. It's not even an argument, it's just a spew of words.
I've read a lot of English novels; some of them were quite good. But out of the vast output of English novels? Feh, most are as forgettable as all the ones we've forgotten from the 19th century. What, you think the handful of names you know wrote all the novels the English language could hold? They were the 10%, made possible only because of the 90% who churned out rubbish.
Can't have one without the other. Most Hollywood movies are crap; as are most novels in English. It's that state of affairs that makes the worthwhile movies and novels possible. If you don't understand that, you don't understand enough to have an informed opinion on any art.
It used to be one of my jobs when I worked in a library to go through those boxes of books donated when some old person died and their kids emptied out their book shelves. Easily 80 or more percent were nothing anyone was ever going to read again. I had the job because I was unromantic enough to be able to rip them out of their covers and throw them in the bin to be pulped. I read through quite a number of them, they were trash but no more so than even some well-thought of movies.
DeleteI read one review of John Ford's abominable use of Sandoz's great Cheyenne Autumn that said he inserted material from a Howard Fast novel. Now, I will say that Howard Fast wasn't a lousy writer but how many people even read him anymore? Maybe that's one of the worst results of having a college educated class that is post-literate, who watch movies and TV more than they read. I remember being impressed at how many in the "Brain Trust" didn't seem to read anything, they only talked about crappy movies and TV shows and stuff like that.
I think Hollywood does and has turned out more crap per production than the equivalent sector of the publishing industry in the same period. The real problem is that its crap gets seen by millions of more people than who ever even read one book in the same year and, through the illusion of theatrical production, it is, somehow, more easily mistaken as being real history if not real life. I remember the time when I got into a huge row with two or three of the actual smart people who frequent Eschaton over their assertion that Inherit The Wind was an accurate retelling of the Scopes trial. They really, truly believed that it accurately represented what happened when it was near complete fiction. And then there were those at the same venue who believed "Shakespeare in Love" was a bio-pic. Even Stoppard - who I abhor - said he'd made the whole thing up.
Well, you know, cowboys weren't working class stiffs,they were romantic icons of freedom!
DeleteFrom what I've read from people who knew they mostly were those who couldn't get better work, who were worked to death, enslaved, exploited and often raped and if they didn't die in their teens or become a pathological killer when they finally got hold of a gun got out of it as fast as they could. They were the quintessential rural exploited labor. Only that wouldn't make nearly as good a shoot-em-up vicarious experience for the suburban-urban Rexall Ranger. Or those who read articles about western movies and movie makers in the NY Times or the New Yorker and dutifully parrot the POV contained therein. I think John Ford owed pretty much most of his present status to people like Orson Welles turning him into the kind of major cultural figure such as those degraded forms of acting arts substitute for actual figures of intellectualism. I look and see phony crap stories with some fair nature photography getting crapped up by them.
DeleteAs Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of EVERYTHING is crap.
ReplyDeleteThat's a given. You're still a philistine snob moron.