Word: cool
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...witty response to Jackson Pollock's proclamation, 21 years before, that "I am nature," the distance between artistic generations couldn't have been clearer. Here was the age-old struggle of the sacred and the profane updated; here was the earnestness of inner spirit vs. the irony of outer cool...
With his ice-white wig and his freon-filled veins, Warhol and his deadpan cool spoke volumes about the new, acquisitive culture suddenly exploding in the '60s, buoyed by the youthful confidence of the Kennedys' Camelot. Yanked up in voltage and turned garishly hip, Warhol's iconic images of Jackie after J.F.K.'s murder, and his tabloid pictures of cars crashed and suicides, replaced dignity with glitz, marrying starstruck glamour to grisly death. Nothing since has seemed so electric and shallow, so perfect a mirror of what was happening to the state of America's spirit. The soulfulness of Pollock...
...there a Headless Horseman? Then he'd better cut off some heads--heads that, when detached by the whoosh of the Horseman's blade, go spinning, rolling, bobbing as if each were a top, a bowling ball, a Halloween apple on its way from Hollow to hell. (The terminally cool Tussaud effects are by Kevin Yagher, who also worked on the script.) Irving's Horseman, a long-dead Hessian mercenary, was most likely a story to scare away intruders and, when Ichabod sees him, a human prankster toying with the gullible schoolteacher. Here, though, the creature must be realer than...
...know how geeks like to quote movies, thinking that cultural references make them cool? Well, who do you think makes e-mail viruses? This reference is to the Seinfeld episode where the gang meets a sick young man who has to live in a bubble. The corrupted e-mail registers the recipient in his or her Outlook Express program as "Bubbleboy" of "Vandelay Industries" (a reference to one of George Costanza's fictional workplaces). Melissa, an earlier e-mail virus, makes a similarly hip reference to the Simpsons when opened, but the name itself supposedly came from a stripper...
...take inordinate pride in the elaborate stuff for the elaborate stuff's sake. Of course, that's what a Bond movie means nowadays. People expect there to be lavish stunts and overwhelming explosions wherever 007 wends his way, and there's nothing wrong with that, on paper. Hey, cool stuff is cool, I know that. The thing is, when film sequences are designed with the idea of being extravagant specifically in mind, they inevitably turn out muddled and less than satisfying. Think back to really effective action sequences in recent movies, and you'll see it was their simplicity which...