Word: 60s
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Question: How much freight should a '60s musical icon have to carry? (Another question: How'd we get through that decade without using the word icon to refer to every pop star?) Forty years ago, the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and a lot of other talented young folks, wrote and performed terrific songs that opened the minds of people my age, expanded the pop-music vocabulary and generally made listeners feel smarter, cooler, better. And now we have two ambitious movies - Julie Taymor's Across the Universe and Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, both of which played this...
...going to put down ten bucks to see skewed visions of what happened 40 years ago? What demographic could the movies appeal to? Not the adults who were young then: the '60s kids are in their 50s and 60s now, and the only members of their age group who still go to movies are critics, like me, who are paid to. Nor do the films have much appeal for today's young people. No one under 45 could even remember the '60s, let alone have lived meaningfully through those days. Kids are nostalgic for, like, Kurt Cobain, and the Adam...
...years just after World War II, Hollywood produced a slew of nostalgic movies using the sing-along music of 40 years before, because the songs summoned a more placid and innocent age. If contemporary filmmakers are digging up the songs of the '60s, maybe it's because they remind us of a bolder, more vibrant time than our own. Kids actually did stuff then. Those who didn't go to war protested it. (The existence of a military draft helped.) They rebelled against their parents' values, political views and choice of recreational drugs - from martinis to marijuana. They marched...
...maybe something is to be learned from movies about the '60s. But my guess is the classroom will be empty...
...Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the Brit TV comedy-writing duo who both turned 70 this year, the movie constructs six characters in search of the '60s Zeitgeist: the Liverpudlian Jude (Jim Sturgess), his American girlfriend Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), Lucy's rebellious brother Max (Joe Anderson), the Janis Joplin-like Sadie (Dana Fuchs), the Jimi Hendrix-ish JoJo (Martin Luther McCoy) and the Asian, vaguely Yokonian, finally lesbian Prudence (T.V. Carpio). They come together in New York City and manage to get involved in or affected by most of the decade's Big Movements: student unrest...