Re: online rant

Tina,

Loved your spam rant. I was reading a history of online spam the other day
and was thrilled to know that the term does indeed derive from the invading
vikings singing in the cafe in Python. It made me feel better about all the
penis enlargement offers and online drug stores that greet me every morning.

As to your movie rant, I feel I must share this. Just an hour ago I was
channel surfing and came upon a film whose title I did not recognize. It was
called "Rooftops." My cable system allows me to click an "info" button and receive
a short description of the selected program. This is what I saw:

"A roof-dwelling combat dancer loves a crack king's sister in a Manhattan
ghetto."

Of course he does.

Still, American cinema gave us Wells and Wilder and Hitchcock and Scorcese
and Woody and Jim Jarmusch and the Coen Brothers and so many others.

In the spring of '04, I am teaching a course for undergraduates entitled
"American Movies You Should Have Seen by Now." I've been asking students for a
year or two if they've seen this or that film. The ones I've included in the
course (I could only pick six or seven) were all ones nearly all of them
admitted (to my shock and dismay) they had never seen. I asked the students in my
"American Movie Musicals" seminar this past term and in my Coen Brothers course
the year before about these and they too had not seen most of them. There are
reasons for choosing any number of great films, of course, but the final
list, designed to allow me to construct a few narratives of cultural, historical
and critical analysis, now looks something like...

Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Sunset Boulevard, Rebel Without
a Cause, The Graduate, Annie Hall, and The Godfather.

I'm looking forward to it.

All the best,

--John (listening to Joni, who can still make me cry)
    

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Received on Tue Jun 24 23:16:03 2003