Word: listenability
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Okay, listen carefully...
...Listen, all, to the imaginary testimony of a few summer-movie Dads Anonymous. They sound like Hollywood moguls swearing off R-rated rotgut for the 12-step program of PG uplift...
Walter Matthau in Dennis the Menace: "I'm an old codger named Mr. Wilson, and the little blond kid next door drives me nuts. Baby-sitting Dennis is like having to listen to MTV at top volume. But he will foil a thief, retrieve the stolen booty and make me a better human being. G.D. that...
...shakes. Even by French standards, Claude Sautet's drama tends to dither a bit. Yet the film displays a wonderful attention to the spaces between what people say and what they mean. Because the business of its main characters is making music, we spend many rewarding moments watching people listen. And then, because this is a kind of love story, we watch a woman watching a man. Here, the actors are the audience; they do what...
When haven't the dons and high-culture fogies complained that culture is in decline? The pronouncement is always delivered with a mixture of fretfulness and self-congratulation: Americans aren't interested in Shakespeare, won't listen to Stravinsky -- and it's because of television, Hollywood, all the meretricious easy-access audiovisual crud. In fact, a strain of cerebral artiness is suddenly proliferating in the mainstream, a funny autodeconstruction that in the past decade has moved from European literature (Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler), to West End theater (Michael Frayn's Noises...