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

Posted 5:36 PM by Gene

Blah blah blah blah moon, blah blah blah blah star:

I feel like a traitor to my fellow parents for even saying this. These movies are made in part for me: a socially progressive, irony-friendly Gen Xer with rug rats. I thought Hoodwinked! and most of the Shrek series were hilarious, and God knows I don't want to go back to the days of suffering with my kids through a long, slow pour of Uncle Walt's wholesome syrup. But even if you ultimately reject their messages, old-school fairy tales are part of our cultural vocabulary. There's something a little sad about kids growing up in a culture where their fairy tales come pre-satirized, the skepticism, critique and revision having been done for them by the mama birds of Hollywood. Isn't irony supposed to derive from having something to rebel against? Isn't there a value in learning, for yourself, that life doesn't play out as simply as it does in fairy tales? Is there room for an original, nonparodic fairy story that's earnest without being cloying, that's enlightened without saying wonder is for suckers?

I have often said the biz would be better off without the ad-blurbists, and now I'm thinking it would be better off without show-biz writing of any kind PERIOD. How often have the hacks said that some cultural trend or another is the greatest thing since SUMNER created the universe, and how often have these same scribblers come back two years later to say maybe they shouldn't have said that? It's all revisionism, revisionism whose goal is precisely that of the Kremlin heavy thinkers who airbrushed inconvenient faces from existence, revisionism that would not be necessary if they viewed things with that cold skeptical eye of legend they're supposed to have in the first place.

I HATE NEWS HACKS!!!!!