Word: gimcracks
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Catching the wave of a profitable gimcrack trend -- that explains why people make these movies. But why do people pay to see them? Are filmgoers, like conscientious environmentalists, determined to recycle everything, including the detritus from the glowing box in their living room? Are they so afraid of the present that they take refuge in the airiest, least threatening artifacts of their past? Even so-called contemporary movies, like Reality Bites, make iconic references to '70s TV shows. Even so-called original movies have the relentless closeups, the pummeling pace, the insistent underscoring and the audience-prodding reaction shots...
...throwback to a time when the cultural mission was clear, thinking was big, and budgets were gigantic. But then Meier, 57, is rather gloriously anachronistic -- and high-minded and portentous -- himself. While most of his peers have spent the past two decades feverishly inventing (or capitulating to) a sometimes gimcrack neo-neoclassicism, Meier has remained an unrepentant circa-1927 Corbusian -- modernism's last best heir. "I don't think you change your values every day or every time you do a new building," he says. "If you are worried about style or what is the trend of the moment...