Word: americanizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some of the projects (The House on Haunted Hill, with Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush, and Jan de Bont's The Haunting) are remakes. Others recall The Exorcist, Jaws, Rosemary's Baby. But that conservatism simply underlines the urge of top filmmakers to rediscover an honorable American tradition: the tale of psychological terror. Invented by Poe, mastered by Melville, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft--and branded forever on film by Hitchcock--the horror genre is too important to be left to the kids. It speaks to every doubt and guilt we silently carry; it lends a seductive form to fear...
Were it not for these instances in which a call to Agent Mulder might seem in order, Passions would appear indistinguishable from almost any other soap opera. Marxism may not find much expression in contemporary American pop culture, but it certainly still thrives on daytime serials, where conflict often revolves around a town's monied Protestant dynasty and its less privileged newcomers. Here, we have the Cranes vs. the Lopez-Fitzgeralds. In typically unseemly soap opera fashion, it is Theresa Lopez-Fitzgerald (Lindsay Korman), Hispanic and the daughter of a maid, who is the gold digger who goes after Harmony...
...above Blue Hill Bay, and the barn is still attached to it, Maine fashion, and down at the water's edge is the little boathouse where White wrote his children's stories Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, along with the many essays that have entered the canon of American literature: "Once More to the Lake," "Death of a Pig," "The Geese" and half a dozen others...
...pavilion is typically a lightning rod, a superpower's force reflected in high production values and heavy funding for an American artist whose work is internationally known. This year's display is no different, with backing of about $1 million from government and private sources, including a $100,000 grant from the glitzy fashion house Gucci (and the requisite glamour of Gucci's creative director, Tom Ford, posing on several occasions with Hamilton as his bodyguards stood stonily by). These are the trappings of America's high-end art culture at the end of the century: spectacle is required...
...with her husband and five-year-old son during the six weeks that she and a crew of nearly 20 created the show, Hamilton explains the new approach. "When I started this project, I wanted to make something big and yet something almost humble and empty, to comment on American domination," she says. "There is so much in our history that we cannot look at, that we refuse...