Word: righteous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is plenty to be grateful for in James Cameron's electrifying parable of two righteous single mothers, one an earthling in her mid-80s (after 57 years of floating in hypersleep), the other a mammoth uggy bug. Among these perks is a golden opportunity for Hollywood. It can finally discover in Weaver the stellar creature that Ivan Reitman, her director in Ghostbusters, has already proclaimed her: "the perfect contemporary heroine...
...Eighth District, any politico will tell you that the race is over on September 16, the day of the Democratic primary election. The polls have stopped even mentioning the two remaining Republican candidates. It is a one-party election, anathema to self-righteous critics of Third World governments...
...jeans, Whoppers and soda pop. But ask again, on a dull, gray, Spenglerian day, and the view is altogether different. Alarming, appalling, totally awesome. The critic Dwight Macdonald called pop culture a spreading ooze back in the 1950s, when Sylvester Stallone was still just a boy. Today America's righteous pop thug is huge, ubiquitous, swaggering from one medium into the next and the next: he is a movie warrior, he is a TV cartoon character, he is a plastic doll, he is a music-video creature and now, in candy racks all over America, he is chewing gum--Rambo...
What is it about the works of Howard Hawks (The Big Sleep, Bringing Up Baby), Chuck Jones (Bugs Bunny cartoons), Phil Spector (The Ronettes, The Righteous Brothers) and Aaron Spelling (The Love Boat, Dynasty) that make them unmistakably American artifacts? To a good part of the rest of the world, the U.S. is nothing but its global pop gush. Not the Bill of Rights, not Mary Cassatt, not George Balanchine but Madonna, The A-Team and Sidney Sheldon. The respectable pieties are correct: sure, America is the land of freedom and the land of opportunity. But it is perhaps more...
Outrage and ecstasy are in short supply these days. The first emotion is too righteous for the Age of Ambiguity; the second has been debased into the brand name of an upscale drug. So it is salutary for a film to examine and embrace those anachronistic, ever-so-'60s extremes. Bliss wants to pose the biggest questions -- about life, death and the twilight state in between that passes for existence -- in the weirdest way. It fulminates like a bag-lady savant on the toxic dangers of technology and moral compromise. It has big, randy dreams about its hero's search...