Word: uplifts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...often, though, the Academy has rewarded films at the high end of mediocrity, operating within a narrow band of reassuring realism. They're called "movies of quality," which really means movies of piety--stories of cozy spiritual uplift (Mrs. Miniver, Going My Way) or, more recently, of superior damaged creatures (Rain Man, A Beautiful Mind). And they're often chosen over edgier fare. Thus, in 1977 the softhearted Rocky beat four superior films (All the President's Men, Bound for Glory, Network and Taxi Driver), and in 1982 another inspirational sports movie, Chariots of Fire, won out over Reds...