 |
| 等 级：资深长老 |
| 经 验 值：8865 |
| 魅 力 值：888 |
| 龙 币：17408 |
| 积 分：9212.4 |
| 注册日期：2001-05-22 |
| |
|
|
|
The Old Days Never Looked So Good(Reading Material , From NY Time)
The Old Days Never Looked So Good
By CHRIS NELSON
ick up a paper, turn on the radio, surf the Net, and you just might get the impression that the hottest thing among critics today is . . . yesterday.
Uninspired by much of Hollywood's new offerings, Roger Ebert, the film critic for The Chicago Sun-Times, has been writing about pictures of yesteryear. Editors say they're focusing on the past to enlighten a new generation ignorant of pop culture before the era of Bruce, Prince and Madonna. Whatever the motivation, art that's 10, 30, even 70 years old is drawing considerable attention from sources like Rolling Stone, National Public Radio and the music magazine Blender.
In recent weeks, Mr. Ebert has tackled "The Hustler" (1961), "In Cold Blood" (1967) and "Unforgiven" (1992) in his biweekly Sun-Times Great Movies series. Reviews of the old pictures receive twice the space he gives current films.
"So much of the new stuff is just not very challenging for an intelligent viewer," he said.
Susan Stamberg, a 30-year NPR veteran, agrees. Over the past few months, she has broadcast extended essays on cultural touchstones like the Mamas and the Papas' hit "California Dreamin' " and a famous 1941 Rita Hayworth pinup as part of NPR's Present at the Creation series.
There is, Ms. Stamberg said, a "paucity of anything fresh or original in contemporary pop culture."
"It's not an accident that Broadway is so full of revivals," she added.
Mr. Ebert's Great Movies series and NPR's Present at the Creation are part of a wider trend of taking new looks at dusty classics. Mr. Ebert may have started the wave when he began his old-flicks column in 1996. Rolling Stone picked up on it in 1999 with the RS Hall of Fame, a series of new reviews of time-honored albums.
And the momentum is building. When Blender had its debut last year, it included a regular two-page feature called The Greatest Songs Ever. NPR kicked off Present at the Creation in January. On television, VH1 recently began broadcasting "Ultimate Albums," a show about genre-defining CD's.
Some creators of these series say audiences are hungering for cultural comfort food in a post-9/11 world. But some cultural critics argue that the trend is symptomatic of a deeper problem: today's commercial artists have a shallowly cynical view of the world, which drives critics to tout the aesthetic ambitions of the past.
"There's a general demoralization about social life reflected across culture," said Robert McChesney, a research professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "That tends to be antithetical to creating great work. When you're living in exciting, dynamic times, in a moment of history, that's great for high-quality entertainment."
One factor that led Mr. Ebert to develop Great Movies was the demise of film societies and art houses that followed the VCR boom of the early 1980's. There's a generation today, he said, that assumes that George Lucas in essence founded the film industry with "Star Wars" in 1977.
Those same kids might know an old guy named David Bowie released an album called "Heathen" this year, but might never have heard Mr. Bowie's 1972 opus "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars." Enter Rolling Stone. Recent editions of its Hall of Fame have re-examined the Clash's self-titled debut and Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" (both from 1977) and the War album "The World Is a Ghetto" (1972).
Fifty or 100 years ago, there were widely accepted works you could be familiar with and be considered culturally educated, said Nathan Brackett, a senior editor of Rolling Stone. Today, roughly 30,000 new CD's are released each year, and those albums compete for teenagers' attention with films, television, video games and the Internet. Without some sort of guide, there is simply too much current work for the young to keep up with and still learn about the past.
The Hall of Fame also allows Rolling Stone to atone for previous sins. "We freely admit to sometimes getting the first review wrong," Mr. Brackett said. "Most famously, we gave Nirvana's `Nevermind' three stars" out of five in 1991.
Mr. Brackett urges his writers to stick within the confines of the record sleeve when writing reassessments. By contrast, NPR's Present at the Creation revolves primarily around the cultural context in which a work was born, as well as the influence it has had since. Financed by the National Endowment for the Arts, the series grew from the NPR 100, an exploration of notable 20th-century American musical works two years ago. The new series's scope is broad enough to tackle "National Lampoon's Animal House," quiz shows, "Home on the Range," recliner chairs and the word O.K.
It's hard not to see some of these series as hands extended to particular audiences. Rolling Stone's Hall of Fame wasn't conceived for aging hippies, Mr. Brackett said. Nevertheless, older subscribers who aren't thrilled that this former counterculture journal has put Britney Spears on its cover four times in three years may be assuaged to see the classic rocker Steve Miller waiting for them at the end of the reviews section.
Blender's feature focuses on songs instead of entire albums precisely because the editor-in-chief, Andy Pemberton, knows that his young readers will be downloading the tracks. Tunes ranging from Public Enemy's 1989 protest "Fight the Power" to Glen Campbell's 1968 "Wichita Lineman" have earned Blender's greatest-ever distinction.
Retro critiques undoubtedly appeal to writers, who often see them as an excuse to trade the present for well-worn favorites and for work released before their careers started.
"If you're going to devote your life to being a movie critic, occasionally you want to reassure yourself that it's worth doing, that the movies are worth devoting your attention to," Mr. Ebert said.
Still, critics have a responsibility to produce something meatier than nostalgia, said Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University. If new reviews delve only as deep as players and plots, they offer little beyond answers for a future game of Trivial Pursuit.
Mr. Pemberton has no qualms about describing Blender's Greatest Songs Ever as pure entertainment rather than educational fare. A former editor for the British music magazine Q, he said Americans had no need to worry about becoming infatuated with the art of earlier eras. Despite the trend toward nostalgia, American readers are too consumed by tomorrow to be held back by yesterday.
"In England, we're engulfed in history, sort of swamped in it in a way," he said. "Nothing can possibly be as good as something that's gone before, and it's a shame."
In a sense, the backward-looking trend continues a spiral that Hollywood has been in for years. Rather than take a chance on new scripts, movie studios return to "Star Wars," "Austin Powers" and "Men In Black," to name a handful of the franchises that have dominated multiplexes this summer. They rewrite television shows like "The Fugitive." And television even remakes itself with NBC's "Rerun," the show based on new players' acting out vintage sitcom scripts.
Consumers, too, have turned to the familiar, particularly since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. When last year's new television season opened later that month, former favorites on the wane, like "Friends," shot back to the top of the ratings.
Ms. Stamberg believes that the spate of fresh looks at old work bears the imprint of 9/11.
"It's been such a chaotic time in this past year, that there's something very reassuring in these touchstones," she said. "It's so much harder to create these days, I think. It's harder for artists to really pull themselves together and find new things to say because they are still recovering."
If that's the case, they'll nonetheless rally at some point. And perhaps they'll make work engaging enough to pull critics into the present.
Perhaps. But most of the retro series have no end in sight, though Present at the Creation will wind down with the close of 2002.
"This won't last forever," Ms. Stamberg said, "but I think it's a moment for that."
(此文由chuckliu在2002-09-11 12:04:06编辑过)
|
| |
|
|
2002-09-11 10:02:59
