Word: antiwar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...television directly into the bloodstream. Viet Nam was so intimately recorded that it became almost unendurably real-yet also impossibly remote, 9,000 miles away, a dark hallucination. And along with the war on the tube came the rest of the theater of the '60s: riots, assassinations, the antiwar moratoriums, the Yippies' carmagnoles, the circus of the counterculture...
...stilted soliloquies of acceptance. But this year, beneath the usual wisecracks and show business sentimentality, there was more interesting drama. Jane Fonda, anathematized for years because of her radical politics and trip to Hanoi during the war, won the Best Actress award for her role in Coming Home, an antiwar film focused sympathetically on the suffering of wounded American veterans. (Fonda, who is relentless, gave half of her acceptance speech in sign language "because there are 14 million deaf people in this country." New York Daily News Critic Rex Reed wrote bitchily that it "looked like an audition...
...heat is by no means gone, of course. Outside the awards ceremonies, a remnant group of Viet Nam Veterans Against the War shouted protests about The Deer Hunter, which in style and message is a world away from Coming Home. The vets echoed the criticism of many old antiwar activists, who regard Cimino's cartoon treatment of the Vietnamese (played in the movie, incidentally, by Thais) as screaming sadists, much given to atrocity. Fonda called The Deer Hunter "a racist, Pentagon version of the war" -a judgment she reached without having seen the movie. Gloria Emerson, who covered...
Coming Home has at least the charm of its political clarity; it is a straightforwardly and movingly antiwar movie that is saved from being a mere tract by its rich performances and its compassion for the Americans who fought and suffered in the war. The Deer Hunter is far more elusive-more forceful, less coherent, more artistically ambitious but also dangerously close to political simplism, historical inaccuracy and moral kitsch...
...found in the thought of Mao... was beyond him [Levenson] as a Jew in exile." The limits of the Jewish experience (limiting the comparisons that Levenson could make from within his own culture), McDonald held, prevented Levenson from responding to the burning political issues of his day, the antiwar movement at home, the Cultural Revolution in China...