On Friday, September 7, 2001 at 12:02:36 PM UTC-4, Nimrod`` wrote:

On Fri, 07 Sep 2001 10:21:34 -0400, Ruth <not...@still.nothere>
wrote:

In article <pFKYOzCPgTvuhv...@4ax.com>, Nimrod``
<nim...@go-c.com> wrote:

I....I.....I can't believe it but I actually suffered through this
whole damn treatise. I haven't forced my way through this much musty
navel lint since I was a self-serious college-age Jesuit.

I'm tellin' ya...it's been eons since I read the like, folks. This
guy Carney actually takes four to five bottomless paragraphs of
sterile doublespeak per sub-topic to describe long-known aspects of
moviemaking shorthand which history's best filmmakers grasped on
instinct while screwing some broad in their trailer or popping
one-too-many corks.

Matt's Messiah is Exhibit-A on why the world needed a Pauline Kael who
kept us in touch with our organic excitement about cinema.....instead
of sucking it dry like some academic vampire. She was the antidote to
those like Carney the Vampire who muddied the waters, giving off grave
illusions of newfound discovery by hammering their unwitting victims
with dense prose....when all he's really doing is raking over dry old
bones. He's like that politician-lawyer alluded to by Hal Phillip
Walker's soundtruck in Altman's NASHVILLE: If you ask him the time of
day he'll tell you how to build a watch.

(Heehee...how's that for tilting things back on-topic to the passing
of Our Lady Kael?)

Hehe....well done. But I am still not sure how I feel about the Carney >article...I think I may read it again( and I have read it twice) . It
does rather remind me of many late night conversations with the eager >young college student self procalaimed "radicals"of my yoot. There is a >need, it seems, to disadain much of went before when you are young and >silly ( as opposed to old and silly like me). My problem is that I like >Jon Jost, Cassavettes and Von Trier as well as Stephen Spielberg,Robert >Altman, and whoever the heck directed the second Star Trek movie. I must >be confused.

Dat's okay, Ruth....your confusion is commendable. And it was
Nicholas Meyer.
By the way, I love Von Trier as much as I love Robert Altman...which
is, alas, more than I love Cassavetes these days (though I still have
a soft place in my heart for him and enjoy revisiting him
periodically).
I can't help but wonder what our young Israelite, wandering in his
aesthetic desert, would think of the likes of Lars Von Trier...who practically derails the pinball with his bells and whistles; the only
natural heir to Welles, me thinks. Perchance, have you seen his film
of Carl Theo. Dreyer's script, MEDEA? I think it's great. Dreyer is
one of my favorite directors....I get life'sblood from VAMPYR, DAY OF
WRATH, PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC....and I think Von Trier is probably the
only living director who could have done such justice to Dreyer's
screenplay. Of course, it doesn't hurt that he's a fellow countryman.

N``

20 years later..... this is still potent stuff, and well worth wrestling with in every successive generation if we're up to the task. Knee-jerk anti-intellectualism aside, it can be difficult going, agreed - but like JFK said, we do this not because it
is easy, but because it is hard.... looking at our assumptions and blind spots always is.

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