Andrew Pulver: “The British don’t do art cinema. Social realism is our thing, or period movies, or rom-coms, or satire. That’s the received wisdom, anyhow. … Until now. Quietly, with little fuss, and almost no critical fanfare, it looks as though we are in the middle of a British art-cinema bonanza, the like of which we haven’t seen for decades.”
Tag: 07.24.09
What’s Happened To Public Sculpture?
“Outdoor art isn’t what it used to be. Once it honored heroic individuals and upheld values that whole populations could embrace.” (Think of the Statue of Liberty, or the Grand Army Plazas in Manhattan and Brooklyn.) “Today, excepting memorials like the Vietnam veterans wall, outdoor art serves rather to divert, amuse and comfort. … The big problem for outdoor art is the absence of any consensus of values in our pluralistic, multicultural society. It’s hard to imagine a public sculpture of a hero today that would not be regarded by one faction or another as partisan.”
Insanity? You Have No Idea: On The Set Of Apocalypse Now
Author Robert Sellers revisits the scene, where Francis Ford Coppola was writing the script on the fly, cast and crew were dealing with tropical diseases and typhoons and heart attack and seizures, and Marlon Brando refused to work with Dennis Hopper. (Not to mention the dead bodies …)