Word: criticize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Shows like Julia and I Spy (which teamed Bill Cosby with Robert Culp) succeeded by spotlighting black people who were fully assimilable -- the sort of blacks who, as one critic notes, "could move into your neighborhood and not disturb you at all." Ghetto comedies of the '70s like Good Times did a better job of reflecting black life, but they were betrayed by buffoonery (Jimmie Walker's strutting J.J.). Roots, of course, brought the black experience to a wider audience than any other show before or since, but its popularity, the documentary notes, came only by making slavery acceptable...
...canceled. Steven Bochco's drama Civil Wars, ABC's post-World War II soap opera Homefront, CBS's nostalgic sitcom Brooklyn Bridge, and NBC's family drama I'll Fly Away were all marginal performers in the ratings. But all will be back in the fall. They are upscale, critic-friendly shows that, the networks hope, could catch on with a little patience...
...Rabbit is Rich is, I think, oneveryone's list of greatest American works," saidBluementhal, who teaches Updike's novelSelf-Consciousness in his course. "He'sboth a consummate prose stylist and a reallybroad-ranging thinker and critic...certainly hewill go down as the essential American novelist ofthis period...
...just at this time, movie revisionists discovered Ed Wood. For the 1980 Golden Turkey Awards, Wood was voted "The Worst Director of All Time," and Plan 9 "The Worst Film of All Time." Critic J. Hoberman, in the book Midnight Movies, proclaimed Wood "the ultimate cult director, the terminal manifestation of 'expressive esoterica.' " Glen or Glenda showed up on the late-night circuit, and soon much of the auteur's awful oeuvre was available on videocassette. Now Wood, anonymous in life, is notorious in death. He wrote but did not direct Orgy of the Dead; yet the video box ballyhoos...
Grey calls those who treat Wood with benign contempt "jackals of bourgeois sensibility." And he's right. As critic Jim Morton notes, "If there is a 'worst film ever made,' it is one that is boring -- a sin Ed Wood Jr. is rarely guilty of." But there is a more melancholy irony to be found in Grey's interviews with the director's colleagues. Unlike most trashmeisters, Wood had radical messages for his audience: about sexual tolerance (Glen or Glenda), nuclear madness (Plan 9), parental smugness (The Sinister Urge). He was as dedicated to filmmaking as Welles or Kurosawa...