Word: realism
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...unheralded gem of American cinema. Raging Bull (1980). The finest sports movie ever made, with grit courtesy of Marty. Citizen Kane (1941). Orson Welles' masterwork remains the ur-text of film schools worldwide because it blew wide open the envelope of cinematic possiblity. Mean Streets (1973). The gritty realism of Scorsese's breakthrough movie began the stylish exploration of the low-rent wiseguy that he completed in "Goodfellas." The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The finest American political film ever goes deep and noir into the fear and loathing at the heart of Washington, D.C. The Getaway (1972). Noir cinema reaches...
...such a world, schools focus on teaching scientific realism rather than virginity. Sex-ed teachers tread lightly on the moral questions of sexual intimacy while going heavy on the risk of pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease. Indeed, health educators in some school districts complain that teaching abstinence to kids today is getting to be a futile exercise. Using less final terms like "postpone" or "delay" helps draw some kids in, but semantics often isn't the problem. In a Florida survey, the state found that 75% of kids had experienced sexual intercourse by the time they reached 12th grade...
Photography not only provided this century with two of the things it likes best--greater realism and superior fantasies--but also showed how deeply entwined they can be. Circa 1900, ambitious photographers aspired to pictures that resembled paintings. Then came modernism, which taught them to rethink the characteristics of their own medium. Sharp focus, accidental arrangements and the just-the-facts stuff that cameras provide became a new path to the supreme fictions of art. Of the pleasures cameras give us, the transfiguration of plain reality is the most indispensable. It implies that the world is more than it seems...
...nothing in Ulysses is truly random. Beneath the surface realism of the novel, its apparently artless transcription of life's flow, lurks a complicated plan. Friends who were in on the secret of Ulysses urged Joyce to share it, to make things easier for his readers. He resisted at first: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of ensuring one's immortality...
...these movies were small, intense, black and white, ideally suited to the psychological realism of the Stanislavskian Method, as it came to be known; ideally suited, as well, to Brando's questing spirit. But in the '50s, as he reached the height of his powers, Hollywood sank to the nadir of its strength. Competing with TV, it embraced color, wide screen, spectacle--and was looking for bold, uncomplicated heroes to fill its big, empty spaces. Brando looked (and felt) ludicrous in this context...