nov 26th
kazan was one of the best film directors ever, 'on the waterfront', 'streetcar named desire', 'death of a salesman', 'east of eden', all classics.
he was, however, hounded out of hollywood by the leftist establishment for denouncing communists to senator mccarthy's 'house un-american activites committee'. i personally think kazan did the right thing, because he was disgusted by communists. (a bit like o v vijayan became disgusted with them after being a card-carrying communist for some time.) it's hard for anybody with integrity to be a communist for a long time. indian marxists a) have no integrity, b) get lots of money from china, c) are in the game cynically for power. even they don't believe all the tripe they mouth, except for a few genuinely brain-dead among them.
and the dhimmi leftists in the us kept hounding this terrific artist, even protesting against the lifetime oscar given to kazan, which he clearly deserved.
his last name was kazanagliou, which is a turkish name, but i guess he was a greek immigrant. the turkish name was news to me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/books/review/27simon.html?pagewanted=all
ps. speaking of immigrant filmmakers or actually indian-american filmmakers, what's happening with m night shyamalan? i didn't see 'sixth sense', but i thought 'unbreakable' was pretty much 'unwatchable'. literally. it was too dark, you couldn't see what was going on, and anyway it was pretty awful. didnt see the next film about some creatures in the woods either. is he a bit over-rated?
but then i think spielberg is severely over-rated too. his best film, in my opinion, was 'sugarland express' before he became such a celebrity. although i must say i liked the special effects in 'minority report', esp the little electronic bugs.
5 comments:
I think M. Shyamalan's "Sixth Sense" was his best film. He seems to have gone downhill a little bit since then. However, we'll have to wait and see whether he keeps making the same kind of (dark) movies or moves on and tries different genres. I think his worst was the one where aliens invade the planet. There was a big anticlimax in the end.
An old article, but still funny and informative. About Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw.
link
Spielberg is most certainly over-rated. Not so sure of N Shyamalan. Sixth Sense was good. Unbreakable was so-so.
I guess in the end its all about brand. Spielberg, over the years has maintained his brand value well.
I virtually hated his "Terminal". With Tom Hanks and Zeta Jones he couldn't have made a worse movie.
Off the topic. I was reading some articles on Bihar election results. I am carrying this feeling for sometime now. In due course Congress and BJP would be joining hands. What say janta on this forum? Left/Lalu/Mulayam et al will come together to oppose Congress and push Congress towards the right.
Prediction: After Advani/Vajpayee, the BJP will be leaderless and second rung leaders will cosy up to Congress and vice-versa.
There are some right of the centre leaders in Congress and there are some mass leaders in BJP, not too committed to its ideology. These two together will join hands on the middle ground.
Any takers ?
A congress sans the dynasty and the nehruvian (TM) baggage would be a decent party and would lean to the right of centre. I hope 2nd rung BJP leaders aren't so depraved as to acknowledge the leadership of Ms.Maino and join the congress fold in the event that BJP is headless.
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