| | Laj,
I agree very much with your points in the first two paragraphs of post #52. There are movies and other works of art that represent views and emotions that are far outside my own sense of life but that are nevertheless very well done and meaningful in their own way.
But frequently I would just like to see artistically serious, well-crafted entertainment that does line up with my own sense of life, and with the traditional American sense of life. _Hitch_ does this. Billy Bob Thornton's halftime speech in _Friday Night Lights_ does this. In a more somber emotional palette, _Coach Carter_ also does this. But usually Hollywood has only stumbled in this regard throughout my entire lifetime.
There are many dark, morally ambiguous, possibly malevolent, open-to-interpretation, intelligent, finely-crafted works out there in our culture that discerning, intelligent, philosophically grounded viewers like you and I might appreciate when we are in the mood for a critical challenge. But what I am concerned about, and what I think Andrew, Linz, and many others here are concerned about, is that the average young person today hasn't been exposed to _The Fountainhead_, hasn't been exposed to _The Magic Flute_, hasn't been exposed to Lanza, hasn't been exposed to Chopin or Verdi or Puccini, hasn't been exposed to _Les Misérables_ or anything by Hugo, hasn't been exposed to Michelangelo or Vermeer, hasn't been exposed to _Ninotchka_ or (the original) _Sabrina_.
When they see and hear nothing but tripe on a daily basis, and their only contact with anything halfway thoughtful or well done is an occasional encounter with a work that seethes with malevolence and futility and is chock full of pomo values, that is eventually going to weigh heavily on their souls if they are basically good. And it is going to be an inspiration towards corruption if they are basically bad or pliable. When Hollywood spews forth from its bilges work after work of mindless, unredeemed and unredeemable garbage, sporadically leavened with negative, turgid, angst-ridden pomo chow for decade after decade, that will have an influence on our culture and will tend to drag the American sense of life down towards its level.
I saw the world premier of _Bunty aur Bubli_ ("Bunty and Bubli") three weeks ago. It is the story of two ambitious young people who turn to a life of crime in order to obtain riches and fame. There is nothing inspirational in that _per se_, and in common with most Hindi movies it doesn't have much plot. But the sense of life expressed in this film is radiant, better and grander than anything Hollywood has done in years. In the greatest scene the duo, who have formed a partnership merely to perpetrate confidence schemes, sing that they are slowly starting to fall in love with each other. They are shown against a wild mountainous desert landscape, something like Bryce Canyon in the U.S. The song is titled "Chup Chup Ke" and its refrain is "chup ke chup ke, chori se chori", "surreptitiously, (or 'by theft',) surreptitiously, silently, silently", the words used to describe how a thief moves. So they are literally singing that love is "stealing" up on them.
Hollywood has not produced a single positive musical scene of this calibre since _The Sound of Music_, but Bollywood now turns out multiple films per year with scenes as ebullient. I find the irony striking that the nation that first realized this sense of life on a large scale can no longer create works of art in popular culture that embody it, while on the other side of the world there is a nation whose artists can give voice to it regularly, a nation that not 15 years ago was governed as a socialist madhouse.
-Bill
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