Word: highbrows
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...adventure and a struggle to regain an inheritance without characterization. And you can't make a picaresque film with next to no action. Very little happens in Barry Lyndon. Kubrick's success in 2001 seems to have convinced him that playing the camera lovingly over a tableaux while playing highbrow music on the soundtrack is a substitute for thought and action. Kubrick's sets are at first startling--the lush green beauty of Irish hills and loughs; the crazy-quilt pattern of farmland in the Low Countries; the grounds of an eighteenth-century country house; the glittering interiors...
...what more can I say?--I was a victim of my elitist preconceptions. There I was all winter, reviewing highbrow good-but-not-great movies like Amarcord, Stavisky, Murder on the Orient Express and Godfather II, while all the time a real masterpiece was playing in Danvers. And I would have missed it, too, if it hadn't been for the way the Liberty Tree Mall beckoned out of the mist. As it was, I loved The Towering Inferno and didn't have to dig very deep into my satchel of critical responses to discover...
...dogma of equality of results turns up some bizarre arguments. In his recent book More Equality, Herbert J. Gans, a Columbia University sociologist, draws up a scenario for "cultural equality" that would eliminate "invidious status and other distinctions between 'highbrow,' 'middlebrow' and 'lowbrow' levels of taste." "A culturally equal society," writes Gans approvingly, "would thus treat all ways of expressing oneself and acting as equal in value, status and moral worth." But why should a taste for Lawrence Welk instead of Pablo Casals, or Jacqueline Susann instead of James Joyce, be held of equal...
Besides his organizational skills, Mitterrand has developed a unique campaign style-at once highbrow and low key-that is singularly effective in both entertaining intellectuals and persuading workers. His weapons are wit and irony. Referring to Pompidou's imperious ways with the National Assembly, he remarked recently: "Just because the President was elected for seven years in 1969, does he expect the French people to stand rigidly at attention the whole time?" In another speech, Mitterrand acidulously expressed his hope that if the leftist coalition wins, Pompidou will not act like "a maiden with the vapors" when "he finds...
Henry V. A milestone Shakespearean film. Directing his first film, Laurence Olivier tried to bring a good performance of Shakespeare to a larger and more varied audience than would ever come to the theatre. Some highbrow critics found his film disappointing and unsophisticated the same unfair criticism leveled at more recent films of Shakespeare--but the audiences loved both the spectacular Battle of Agincourt and Olivier's acting...