Sisyphus Shrugged - um. Oy?
Lasciate ogni speranza and put your feet up.
jmhm
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um. Oy?
Roy's got that nice Professor Althouse on the death of Paul Scofield (she posted a YouTube of the striking down the laws scene)
ADDED: Actually, I've never seen "A Man for All Seasons." I was around in 1966 and went to a few movies in those days, but that wasn't one. It might have interested me back then. It must have played around campus in the years went I was in college (1969-1973). In those years, we went to see every movie we had any interest in, because we never knew when we'd get another chance and assumed it would only be on TV with commercials messing it up. But "A Man for All Seasons" was the exactly kind of movie we shunned and scoffed at then.

Well, apparently the professor's legendary mad ego-google skillz are going at full throttle this morning, because come morning she showed up in comments with this
[blah blah blah nobody understands the sixties but me because except for everyone else who reads political blogs I'm the only old person in the world] ...Spokane Moderate, perhaps instead of assuming you're smarter than me, you should spend some time learning the political and cultural history of the United States. You might be almost ready to read my blog, which requires spotting things like you saw -- good for you --and then thinking. You have to put in that extra step, the thinking part. Or you can be lazy and keep reading Roy and laughing at what he tells you to laugh at. The fact is "A Man for All Seasons" is an old-fashioned, stagy movie that is not an interesting piece of film art and does not become so because an old man dies.

So she, um, hasn't seen the movie because she might have been interested but she really wasn't, because, as she knows without having seen the movie, it was presented in a fashion which is archaic forty-one years after the movie was released.

She does, however, have a favorite scene.

This woman, I always feel compelled to point out, is smarter than Glenn Reynolds. Says so right on her front page.

It's one of my favorite factoids.
Comments
burkean From: [info]burkean Date: March 22nd, 2008 06:09 pm (UTC) (linkie thing)
Completely unrelated, but I'm in the city now.

Coffee? Something stronger?
misseli From: [info]misseli Date: March 22nd, 2008 07:19 pm (UTC) (linkie thing)
Fah.

I saw "A Man for All Seasons" because Kevin Smith told me and boy was he right.

If she thinks that is stagy, she must abhor Olivier's "Henry V" ... and thus she is touched in the head, so maybe we can just pat her on the head and say 'there, there, dear' and go about our merry way(s)?
jmhm From: [info]jmhm Date: March 22nd, 2008 10:44 pm (UTC) (linkie thing)
It's interesting that you should mention Henry V (which, btw, HM loves - she hasn't seen the Branagh one yet, but we explained to her that Gilderoy Lockhart played Henry and she thinks that somewhere in the woods of Romania there are amnesiac wizards running around who don't remember winning the battle of Agincourt. But I digress...)

There was an interesting article in the New Yorker not too long ago about Olivier and Orson Welles and how their different visions of what classics should look like on film competed for critical respect.

At the time that Professor Althouse is writing about, the idea that this kind of material should be presented as a sort of grand epic spectacle was very current. It sort of died out, ironically enough, when middle-brow strivers decided that if the lumpen prole found it accessible there must be something wrong with it.

It's a shame, really. Intelligent popular entertainment did society a great deal of good once upon a time.
fledgist From: [info]fledgist Date: March 22nd, 2008 07:54 pm (UTC) (linkie thing)
Completely unrelated, but one of the descendants of More and Roper asked me for my opinion on the retirement of Fidel Castro.

John Stuart Mill continues to astound me with his wisdom.
From: (Anonymous) Date: March 23rd, 2008 07:14 am (UTC) (linkie thing)
"This woman, I always feel compelled to point out, is smarter than Glenn Reynolds. Says so right on her front page."

The scary thing is, I'm not even sure that this is true anymore...

--SL
ahhhs. -- hmmm?
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