Word: starting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Perhaps the biggest present-day threat to the movies, thinks Pauline Kael, is television. The movie directors who get their start on TV are too careless of detail and too enamored of closeups. The old movies shown on TV are truncated, miniaturized versions of the real thing. Growing up on a diet of TV, she is convinced, has put college kids in the habit of walking in and out of movies "as if they were providing their own commercial breaks." And no one who walks out of a good movie is a friend of Pauline Kael...
Along with Alka-Seltzer, Volkswagen, Avis, and Chun King chow mein pointed the way. If critics were to categorize commercials in the manner of plays or films (and why not?), they would find a variety of styles and sub-styles. For a start, one can discern...
...THEATER OF THE ABSURD. A beautiful girl gets into the back seat of a Rolls-Royce,takes off her clothes and climbs into a bathtub brimming with Calgon bath oil. The Dash soap man butts into conversations and flings laundry at innocent people. "Louise Hexter," he commands, "start wearing cleaner blouses!" The shaming, the touch of half-suppressed hysteria, is unsettling. Another instance of the absurd involves the flamenco dancer who stomps the living daylights out of a Bic ballpoint pen that has been attached to his heel. Here the effect is different. One remembers all the other similar nonsense...
...cops as they checked vagrants in "the Deuce," a neighborhood of filthy flophouses. Some men mingled with drunks along the downtown Tenderloin skid row. Several housewives spent a day just sitting in the Greyhound bus terminal, where they saw weary, worried mothers board buses with broods of children to start life somewhere else. Other poverty students vicariously shared the pain of knife, gun and mugging victims in the emergency room of the County Hospital, or walked the brawling bar beat with patrolmen. Shaken by their experiences, the students retreated for a day of barbecue and Fourth of July...
...lights' race lasted a minute longer than usual, because of a strong current against the crews. Harvard led at the start as expected, but Cornell caught up at the quarter mile point of the one-mile and 550 yard race. After that, Cornell pulled away...