Word: forbidden
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Dreams, on the other hand, is old-school nostalgia: a misty-lens look at the past that shows how the '60s' social change roiled one blue-collar family: Mom is dissatisfied; Dad feels the patriarchy slipping away; daughter Meg is seduced by the forbidden libidinal beat of Motown. The Bandstand story line, with archival footage courtesy of co-producer Dick Clark, provides a baby-boomer-friendly sound track. (On TV, American history is the history of TV.) Plots about feminism and civil rights flatter us about how far we have come. And the blue-collar, Catholic setting is free...
...bioterror scare in a sitcom set in the present, it wouldn't make it past the first-draft stage at a major network. Perhaps that's the hidden value of cultural nostalgia. It hints that the past was not better but worse than today, allowing us to exorcise forbidden thoughts about the present. Why do we believe the past was a happier, safer place than today? Maybe simply because we survived it. And because we didn't have love handles back then...
...spirits from the mainland's glory days materialized in Toronto. Tian Zhuang-zhuang and Chen Kaige both made their international mark in 1993: Tian with The Blue Kite, Chen with Farewell My Concubine. Both films won festival prizes abroad; both were banned at home, and Tian was forbidden to make movies for seven years. His comeback film, Springtime in a Small Town, is a remake of a 1948 film by the Shanghai director Fei Mu. A young married couple lives in a kind of genteel torpor, broken by the arrival of the wife's ex-lover. More a still life...
...really. It's infantile. It's babies blissfully playing with themselves and their poop. Any parent knows that children don't have to be carefully taught potty humor; they are born with it. Then the parent teaches them that a fascination with body parts and functions is wrong, dirty, forbidden. Now pop culture teaches them that because it's forbidden, it's funny...
...face still adorns everything from the gate of the Forbidden City to kitschy Cultural Revolution clocks. The portraits serve as frequent reminders that, with each succeeding generation of cadres, the throw weight of Beijing has diminished. Market liberalization introduced by Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, started the decay by freeing millions of entrepreneurs from the state's grasp. Today, Jiang, only the third leader in the history of the People's Republic, has neither the adulation of the masses nor the authority of his predecessors. It is the thousands of mayors, governors, Communist Party chiefs and other functionaries from China...