I feel a compelling need to tell something, to get it off my chest.
During the Thanksgiving holiday, I was in Omaha, and one afternoon the femme with me suggested we sit down and watch her favorite Christmas movie.
I’m deaf; I can hear music only with great difficulty using special technology and a lot of physical energy and concentration, but as music does something for me, inspires the soul, the heart, the intellect, my goodwill towards all people and all things, it’s worth it to me to put up with all that work even though really it’s like laboring a mountain to bring forth a mouse.
Movies are easier for me to “get,†to understand, but at the same time they leave me feeling nothing in particular at all. I’ve always lived very well without television and movies.
But because she was who she was, and because I wasn’t doing anything else at the moment, I said yeah, sure, I’ll watch the movie with you.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Fortunately the specific details of the movie escape me; it was from the late 1940s, starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, and a couple of blonde chicks in a winter wonderland, apparently in Vermont.
By the way, I once read that the famous Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn didn’t care much for his money-making star Danny Kaye because he thought the actor looked “too Semitic.†This was the first time I paid any attention to Danny Kaye, but he looked pretty goy, pretty standard, to me. His nose wasn’t even that big.
While watching it, I was appalled; this was no La Revolution francaise (1989) or Waterloo (1970) or Lawrence of Arabia (1962), the greatest movies ever made. Not even close.
I found it had no plot, and the dialogue, whatever I grasped of it, seemed unreal, preposterous, superficial, and shallow. It was trite, it was silly, it was ridiculous.
Much to my surprise, the femme informed me that in its time, it’d been one of the most popular movies ever made.
That?
I suppose I can see where it might turn on people with no class, no taste, people who think kitsch is aesthetic, people like Attila Marc the Hun on Skins’s island, but man, it’s an insult to anyone with any cultural sensitivities and manners.
It’s been about a week now, but I still cringe when I think of it.
I feel a compelling need to tell something, to get it off my chest.
During the Thanksgiving holiday, I was in Omaha, and one afternoon the femme with me suggested we sit down and watch her favorite Christmas movie.
I’m deaf; I can hear music only with great difficulty using special technology and a lot of physical energy and concentration, but as music does something for me, inspires the soul, the heart, the intellect, my goodwill towards all people and all things, it’s worth it to me to put up with all that work even though really it’s like laboring a mountain to bring forth a mouse.
Movies are easier for me to “get,†to understand, but at the same time they leave me feeling nothing in particular at all. I’ve always lived very well without television and movies.
But because she was who she was, and because I wasn’t doing anything else at the moment, I said yeah, sure, I’ll watch the movie with you.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Fortunately the specific details of the movie escape me; it was from the late 1940s, starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, and a couple of blonde chicks in a winter wonderland, apparently in Vermont.
By the way, I once read that the famous Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn didn’t care much for his money-making star Danny Kaye because he thought the actor looked “too Semitic.†This was the first time I paid any attention to Danny Kaye, but he looked pretty goy, pretty standard, to me. His nose wasn’t even that big.
While watching it, I was appalled; this was no La Revolution francaise (1989) or Waterloo (1970) or Lawrence of Arabia (1962), the greatest movies ever made. Not even close.
I found it had no plot, and the dialogue, whatever I grasped of it, seemed unreal, preposterous, superficial, and shallow. It was trite, it was silly, it was ridiculous.
Much to my surprise, the femme informed me that in its time, it’d been one of the most popular movies ever made.
That?
I suppose I can see where it might turn on people with no class, no taste, people who think kitsch is aesthetic, people like Attila Marc the Hun on Skins’s island, but man, it’s an insult to anyone with any cultural sensitivities and manners.
It’s been about a week now, but I still cringe when I think of it.
The movie was "White Christmas", not one of the best, but in the ranks of "classics" these days.