Word: serioso
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...keep Earth neck-and-neck with the weekend's prestige drama debut, the true-life male weepie The Soloist, which grossed $9.7 million. Retelling the story (already aired on 60 Minutes) of a homeless, schizophrenic cellist befriended by a Los Angeles Times columnist, it's the sort of serioso uplifter that usually gets released in December and garners major awards. Its stars have been in aisle seats on Oscar Night: Jamie Foxx as the musician, Robert Downey, Jr., as the newspaperman. But The Soloist was pulled from a late-year release, to be dumped in the no-man's-land...
...Movie Database lists 429 titles on the subject.) It has become not just a topic but a genre, one that, at its most reductive, exploits the awful events of that chapter in history to badger viewers, intimidate critics, elicit easy tears and serve as a back-patting machine for serioso directors. The excesses of the genre have spawned derisive nicknames: Holo-kitsch (Art Spiegelman's term) and Holocaust porn (which Taylor cites...
...plot: damaged veteran, middle-age girlfriend, young daughter. The Wrestler never rose above fight-movie bromides, never dispelled my gloom. The character stereotyping makes Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa, by comparison, seem as swathed in moral ambiguity as Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers. The movie's serioso sentimentality is doubly strange since the script is by Robert Siegel, an ex-staffer of The Onion and co-writer of The Onion Movie. His old job was puncturing clichés; here he recycles them...
...dominant pop culture certified homophobia. Gays and lesbians were depicted as predators in best-selling novels (A Walk on the Wild Side) and respected plays (The Killing of Sister George), and the films based on them. The plot dilemma of that age's serioso movies was often just the threat of being accused of homosexuality, as in Tea and Sympathy, The Children's Hour and Advise and Consent. The tone was sensation dressed up as sympathy...
...pursue his dream of being a respected film auteur, though still in hardcore. Most directors with a left-field mega-hit would instantly crank out another picture in the same genre. Not Damiano. He used his cash, and cachet, from his silly porno comedy to make a super-serioso drama: Devil in Miss Jones. And this time under his own name. Reading the script, Reems told his friend: "Gerry, it's a steal. This is No Exit in its thinnest disguise." To which Damiano replied: "Well, what do you expect? I wrote it in a weekend...