Saturday, February 5, 2011

Cultural Anthropology

 -- January 23, 2011

Frank Rich writes about two movies I'm looking forward to seeing: "True Grit" and "The Social Network" in his Sunday Column, this one called, "The One-Eyed Man Is King".

My cup runneth over. I'm not really sure of his point; I see only a bunch of disjointed phrases:

"... half-blind 19th-century United States marshal Rooster Cogburn ..." Now how can you be half blind? That's certainly not how a person with a patch on one eye would describe it.

"... winter of high domestic anxiety ..." Is there anyone who hasn't done a variation of the winter of our discontent?

"... refracted a Western yarn through a scintillating and original comic voice ..." Gag me with a spoon! (And, for a book Frank Rich wouldn't have been caught dead reading in 1969.)

"... Americans yearning at a trying juncture ..." Clang, clang, clang!

" ... the movie’s success was hardly foreordained ... " Surprised, he starts huffing and puffing.

"... The Western, like the war movie, was seen as a dying genre, usurped by darker and ever more violent takes on frontier mythology ..." Huh? He's talking about "The Wild Bunch", set in 1913, and "Bonnie and Clyde", set during the Great Depression. What's all this about the frontier?

"... Such was the dyspeptic mood of a nation deep into a fruitless war... ". Quick! Define dyspeptic! Something better than "something bad" I'll give you a clue: War gives you gas.

" ... 'True Grit' in all its iterations has an elegiac lilt ... "

And, I didn't even get to the bottom of the first page.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/opinion/23rich.html

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