Word: upliftment
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...Your heart sinks when you see the grim and unwelcoming opening shots of Frozen River, a first film by writer-director Courtney Hunt, shot digitally and featuring a cast that is off the thermometer when it comes to name recognition. More indie earnestness and uplift, you guess - the kind of picture only Sundance could possibly love. (And Sundance did love it; it won the 2008 Grand Jury Prize for best drama...
...MISSION OF UPLIFT...
...getting into the reality-TV business, it seemed to make as much sense as declaring that her book club would henceforth be devoted to discussing first-person-shooter video games. From her talk show to TV movies like Tuesdays with Morrie, Oprah is the queen of middlebrow televisual uplift. Whereas reality TV is better known for--what's the opposite of uplift? Downpush...
...does play the race card. But he's dealing it to fellow blacks, and if enough of them didn't love it, he couldn't have afforded the lavish new house he built in suburban Atlanta. You could also ask if Perry is mocking the folks he hopes to uplift. But his form of comic melodrama depends on creating emotional extremes, acute cartoons of recognizable behavior, people who hurt and get hurt. Public humiliation is the penance his stage characters must endure before they are absolved in a final embrace and bring the curtain down with a full-throated gospel...
...positive note. There is this need for redemption. The religion in this country is very deeply embedded. Australia is a much more cynical place. Several of my favorite playwrights are British and they tend to be more comfortable with gritty, hard-hitting difficult things. That desire for uplift in the theater has been something that has been quite...