Word: moralizations
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wilderness, for most Americans, is more a fable than a perceived reality. Ecologists and preservationists have made it a moral fable, an emblematic subject drenched in quasi-religious conviction. But this does not make it any less fabulous. The family in the Winnebago, lurching toward Yosemite to be reborn, cannot experience what in the 19th century used to be called the "Great Church of Nature" as it is seen in Adams' photographs: the experience has become culturally impossible. That has also worked to Adams' advantage. By now, his photographs of lakes, boulders, aspens and beetling crags have come to look...
...murder in the darkest jungle. "There is no way to tell [Kurtz's] story without telling my own," Willard explains early on. Coppola apparently hoped that by dramatizing both Kurtz's and Willard's descents into savagery, he would arrive face to face with the moral horror...
Coppola appears to believe that if Kurtz soliloquizes about "horror" and "moral terror," the audience will think that the movie has actually dealt with these matters. But when Willard assassinates Kurtz, we still do not know why the Green Beret went mad, the genesis of his large cult or even the identity of the many gruesome corpses and severed heads that lie strewn about his domain. Nor do we know why Willard, a sudden convert to Kurtz's undefined cause, goes ahead and kills him. By withholding this information, Coppola gives up his final chance to confront the issues...
...real sadness of the movie, however, is not that Kurtz eludes Coppola's grasp, but that Viet Nam does. In its cold, haphazard way, Apocalypse Now does remind us that war is hell, but that is not the same thing as confronting the conflicts, agonies and moral chaos of this particular war. Yet, lest we lose our perspective in contemplating this disappointing effort, it should be remembered that the failure of an ambitious $30 million film is not a tragedy. The Viet Nam War was a tragedy. Apocalypse Now is but this decade's most extraordinary Hollywood folly...
...that American master, with its nocturnal bars and waiting figures. Segal's tableaux have a flavor of the '30s-overlaid, now and then, with a sharp erotic curiosity. Instead of the irony of a '60s Warhol or Lichtenstein, one is treated to an unremitting earnestness, a moral concern with the voids between people and the circumspectness of their gestures. It is a somber sight, this "populist art," as one of Segal's admirers dubbed it; and it gives a special density to the retrospective of 100 works by Segal that is on display at Manhattan...