Hmmm,
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book-Ernest Hemingway
Apparently the First Lady- Michelle Obama made an unannounced stop for many several hours (accompanied by her two daughters) at MoMA in New York July 11 [correction-July 21- I just read that the First Lady was attending a matinee of Kinky Boots- so why did a reliable eye-witness non-MoMA source say otherwise?- a plot thickens?]. Co-inciding with the [non] visit was a screening ofGone With the Wind. and later in the afternoon Cecil B Mille’s Reap the Wild Wind. Now a much maligned name for spectacle: WOW could that guy direct. And direct actors.
What passes for truth in America-even bearing in mind that all things are relative!
And they ALL laughed and jeered when De Mille made Madam Satan.
Did the NY Post critic actually sit through the entire film of Gone With the Wind(recently) before writing his now infamous posting/s?
Lou Lumenick’s position is a very dangerous one in a democracy. Sometimes I've sat through films with many of the world’s most revered critics who seem to wish whatever film they were watching was something it very clearly was never seeking to be. It was beyond me why 12 Years A Slave director Steve McQueen (a revered art gallery artist) allowed a manipulative Hollywood score to awash (well, lap) his anti-slavery movie. Nobody seemed to complain about that.
The New Yorker's Hilton Als introduced and dedicated the MoMA screening of Swing! to burlesque actor Charles Keith (practically unknown now) posing the hypothetical question: what would a documentary about Oscar Micheaux's Swing! filmed by Keith be like? Would they have fought tooth and nail, would Keith have had anything in common with the upwardly mobile black Harlem life of the 30s?
One can immediately think of dozens (if not…) of examples of movies where Lumenick’s ‘criteria’ would equally relegate the said film to ‘museum screenings’. Surely Gone With the Wind is more ado the human race rather than rascism? Aren’t its protagonists just two fascinating foolhardy strong willed people who who frankly don’t really give a damn about the rest of the world? [Certainly enough material in the film to substantiate that view]. Hmmm..you don’t need to walk very far in the affluent suburbs of planet earth to….
Amazing how the same technicolor Gone With the Wind co-cinematographer Ray Rennahan (he shot Britain's 1st technicolor flic Wings of the Morning-1937) could lens an adaptation of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls in the darkest of dark hues (can't find anything about this on google, and MoMA haven't gotten back to me) and for audiences to still flock to it and beawarded Academy's!
Don't Play That Love Song Anymore, Sam
(a big digital company has only a few days ago uploaded Monty Norman on to the net- he wrote the James Bond theme ORIGINALLY. But boy: could he also write a song)
oh..and while we are..hmmm...
Some war veterans ‘soldier’ on like a Gulf War vet I met recently who after several jobs over the decades is still working, going strong at 69 and would put a guy 20 years his junior to shame in the fitness stakes. But that’s not everyone’s story, alas. Of Men and War is warts and all about those unable to cope (no soundtrack music) (MoMADocumentary Fortnight) following a group of soldiers in a post-traumatic stress disorder therapy center in Northern California. (London-June 17)
it was in fact an Englishman who penned the words below NOT (as many many well meaning websites by American military veterans/organisations etc would have "anonymous'):
The Flag does not fly because of the winds that blow it,
The Flag flies because of each Soldier’s last breath blowing past.
For those who have fought and died for it,
freedom has a taste that the protected will never know.
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him,
but because he loves what is behind him.
– G. K. Chesterton (Illustrated London News)
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the Revolution- Simon Schama
age cannot with her nor custom stale her infinite variety
