Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 11:31 AM by Gene

Terry Teachout repeats himself -- and it's worth repeating:

Spider-Man is a movie to which you can safely send the kids, and even accompany them without sentencing yourself to two hours’ worth of agonized squirming. But I’d never pretend for a moment that it’s anything more than a piece of pretty good, morally unobjectionable trash, and as I left the theater, I couldn’t help but ask myself: is unobjectionable trash really the best we can hope for out of American popular culture circa 2002?

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity," Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, a book I judged to be a masterpiece not long after I put aside my comic books. I know better now, and I also know that there is a great deal to be said for pure frivolity. Man cannot live by masterpieces alone, not even bona fide ones.

On the other hand, take a look at this list of non-highbrow movies released a half-century ago: The African Queen, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Big Sky, Five Fingers, The Greatest Show on Earth, High Noon, Hangman’s Knot, Kansas City Confidential, The Lusty Men, Monkey Business, The Narrow Margin, Pat and Mike, The Quiet Man, Ride the Man Down, Singin’ in the Rain, and Son of Paleface. The only things these films have in common are that they were all made in Hollywood and that I happen to like them. Not one opened in an art house (though several are now regarded as classics and can be seen on museum series). If they are representative of what Americans regarded as routine movie-house fare in 1952, then what does that say about America in 2002? Nothing very good, I fear.

Obviously Mr. Teachout doesn't read the ad-blurbists.