Word: kitsched
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...Lake Placid has no sinister air about it, nor could it have; it is not that kind of place. The opening ceremonies were small-town and goodhearted, vaguely resembling a high school football halftime show with unlikely overreachings in the direction of Super Bowl kitsch. A crowd of 22,000-slightly less than capacity, because some ticket holders were stranded without transportation-gathered in the stands at the old Lake Placid horse-show grounds to meet the athletes. The Canadians, the eighth team to march into the stadium behind their colors, brought a deep roar of thanks and a standing...
Victorian painting from both sides of the Atlantic has emerged triumphantly from post-Reginal depression. Long dismissed as sentimental kitsch, mighty canvases of noble beasts, Highland crags and soul-pierced virgins were selling for at most $1,000 in 1967; they go these days for up to $100,000. A sale of 19th century paintings at Christie's in Manhattan returned $1.9 million. "It was a lot of rubbish," snorted one Christie...
...like Demeter Chiparus and Friederich Preiss, whose names are familiar today only to collectors, shaped ivory as if it were butter; the dancing figures they carved were adorned with bronze and stood or reclined on bases of marble or onyx. Many of the statuettes hover at the brink of kitsch, but their brilliant colors and glowing surfaces (clearly reproduced in the tipped-in illustrations) must be seen to be believed...
...miscasting is eventually forgotten. For all the film's rock-concert ambience, its overeager references to Viet Nam and drugs, it has almost nothing to do with the '60s or the counterculture. The movie's true setting is the timeless never-never land of Hollywood kitsch; The Rose is a definitive catalogue of A Star Is Born clichés. The heroine battles with booze and men and show-biz tycoons, but somehow always manages to get out onstage and give a hell of a show. She has only two temperaments, childlike vulnerability and childish tempestuousness...
Meetings with Remarkable Men is the hip '70s answer to Hollywood's oldtime biblical kitsch. Once Cecil B. DeMille re-created the glory days of Moses in glorious Technicolor; now Director Peter Brook is giving the same treatment to G.I. Gurdjieff (1877-1949), the philosopher whose Zen-like quest for spiritual truth has greatly influenced the modern human-potential movement. Though The Ten Commandments and Remarkable Men are theologically antithetical, they are cinematic first cousins. Both films suffer from an excess of piety, a shortage of humor and an infatuation with desert vistas. Still, DeMille's muscular...