Word: criticism
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Following stints as a teacher and a critic, Toback says he finally chose to get his life “back on track” at the age of 27 by writing a screenplay. The Gambler, a semi-autobiographical tale, was eventually made into a movie by director Karel Reisz in 1974. Following Reisz around the set, Toback absorbed filmmaking techniques, and by the end of production, he felt ready to direct his own film...
...romantic appeal. Like Griffith, Micheaux's feminine ideal seemed to be prim, virginal Lillian Gish; he insisted that his actresses wear chalk makeup to make them seem whiter, lighter - Gishier. "The first offense of the new film is its persistent vaunting of intra-racial color fetishism, "wrote the black critic Theophilus Lewis, reviewing a 1931 Micheaux talkie, "Daughter of the Congo," in the New York Amsterdam News. "Even if the picture possessed no other defects, this artificial association of nobility with lightness and villainy with blackness would be enough to ruin...
...When the first volume of Columbia's multi-LP set "The Lester Young Story" (which Sony, shamefully, has still not put out on compact disc) was released in the late 1970s, a critic enthused that this was "jazz at its most Mozartean," and Daniels' take on this assessment is revealing. "The critics' Eurocentric emphasis - as when they likened Young to Mozart, for example - was also troubling? both in and of itself and because it carried such bald connotations of racial superiority in the suggestion that the saxophonist was worthy of comparison with this or that European master." I'll tell...
DIED. DAMON KNIGHT, 79, science-fiction author and critic whose darkly wry short story To Serve Man became a famous episode of TV's Twilight Zone; in Eugene, Ore. An early member, with Isaac Asimov, of the influential writers' group the Futurians, Knight, in 1956, wrote In Search of Wonder, considered among the most important works of science-fiction criticism. The title To Serve Man refers to the name of a manual carried by aliens promising to end Earth's war and hunger. The manual turns out to be a cookbook...
...crisis long in the making. According to Sulak Srivaraksa, a social critic and Buddhist activist, its roots lie in the rise of materialism and state control of the religion. Both began in earnest half a century ago when Thailand started fervently pursuing Western-style development. The military government employed slogans such as "work is money, money is happiness." Those messages were antithetical to Buddhism, which teaches that suffering is quelled by rejecting material desires. In its constitutional role as protector of the state religion, the government began co-opting the clergy into supporting its new consumer culture...