I don't know.
Posted on 01/28/2009 4:46:42 PM PST by mojito
Do you remember The Matrix? It was big a couple of years ago. I think I quoted it in this very space – something about red pills, blue pills, and how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. It was part of the lingo for a while. But the dogs bark and the pop culture caravan moves on. Anyway, a couple of months back an interview in The Guardian with the film’s composer happened to catch my eye. Usually, when an interview with a guy who’s big on the electronic “dance music” scene catches my eye, my eye promptly glazes over, my eyelid closes and declines to re-open until the review of The Roger Ebert Illustrated Guide To Great Lesbian Movie Scenes four pages further on. But in this instance I stuck with the interview all the way to the end.
Rob Dougan, an Aussie who lives in a cool loft on the south bank of the Thames in London, had been asked post-Matrix to remix some Sinatra tracks for the cool kids – add some hip-hoppish electronica here and there. Unfortunately, he liked the records pretty much as they are. He took a crack at “That’s Life”, and was told his remix was not “modern” enough. So it was back to the old drawing board. And then Mr Dougan observed:
“In Sinatra’s time it was really cool to be 50, to be a man. You put on a hat and a suit and you keep on going until you die. Now you get 50-year-old guys in sleeveless T-shirts, going to the gym and desperately trying to fix their hair, and you think: ‘Whatever happened to real men?’”
Well, maybe they had hormone treatments.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Last paragraph of another brilliant piece. To co-opt a line from a song: "When we ever learn"...
FMCDH(BITS)
LOL. I have to say, I love to go to bed. I enjoy sleep. And I used to be a rock and roller. I have gotten to the point where I hate going out at night: we might have lunch out, but seldom a real "dinner" after 6:00. Like Billy Crystal said in "City Slickers," "Then you turn 50 and you have a surgery---they call it a procedure, but it's really surgery. Then you're having breakfast at 5;00, lunch at 11:00, and dinner at 4:00."
I think of some of the movies I love, and “True Lies” comes to mind. Arnold was no spring chicken, and Jamie Lee Curtis was clearly a woman, and not a girl in that. But I agree that the ridiculously young (and always female) scientists and “world renowned” paleontologists, biologists, weapons experts and so on gets old. The absolute worst was Kelly McGillis as an “instructor” at Top Gun. Uh huh.
Being "young" myself, there are certain things you shouldn't reproduce. A Warhol painting, maybe. But not a Sinatra.
I remember when I was young, my dad, my uncles, the neighbors, my friends dads, my coaches, my male teachers, were all MEN. Most, if not all of them, fought in WW2 and Korea. They worked hard, and they had a good honest attitude that “business was business” and “what’s fair is fair.”
I wonder if kids look up to us the same way. I suspect not, because too many of my kids’ teachers, their coaches, their dads and their dads friends, want to be the kids’ friends, not adults.
Silly line thrown in from left field. Denise Richards was 28 at the time, hardly "ridiculously young" to play a nuclear physicist out in the field...heck, I was nearly in the same place as those scenes at the same age, doing that job.
The ridiculous part was the airheadedness for her part as a nuclear physicist. She's not a bright woman or good actress, and it was obvious.
But Steyn seemed to have noticed her! :-)
>>>The absolute worst was Kelly McGillis as an “instructor” at Top Gun. Uh huh.
Was she as bad as Hannah Reitsch?
Don’t know this hannah person
Steyn really gets it on the cultural levels. I addition to the political and economic
But one thing does remain certain: Men aren’t wearing enough hats.
btt
I beg to differ, the worst was the then 22 year-old Nicole Kidman as brain surgeon Dr. Claire Lewicki in “Days of Thunder” (where she hooked up with Tom Cruise).
My favorite... Good Grief! This is 14 years old! ... well, it's timeless ...
It's a fine day
People open windows
They leave their houses
Just for a short walk
They walk by the garden
They look at the sky
Sinatra is timeless and is cool on his own.
Actually, the Kelly McGillis character was modeled after a real person, mathematician Christine H. Fox, who was thirty-two at the time and not bad looking.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
“..Fox started at Center for Naval Analysis as an analyst and steadily worked her way up to becoming president in 2004. During her 24-year career, she has traveled around the world, working directly with Navy, Marine Corps and joint military forces to help them find the best ways to use new weapons and technology and become more effective and efficient. Fox also served on the independent task force studying the Columbia space shuttle disaster.
Fox was even the inspiration for a character in a movie starring Tom Cruise. In the mid-1980s, Fox was CNA’s field representative at Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego, working on site with the F-14 fighter pilots at the elite flying school located on the base. Film producer Jerry Bruckheimer was making “Top Gun,” an action adventure featuring cool flying sequences as the pilots competed to be the best of the best. Cruise played hot-shot pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, and because no Hollywood movie is complete without a little romance, Kelly McGillis was hired to play the love interest.
The original script called for McGillis’s character to be a Navy officer. “The admiral assigned by the Navy to oversee the production had script approval,” Fox recalls, adding that of course, the officer–officer romance was a no-go. “Then [Bruckheimer] suggested that the character could be an aerobics teacher at the Officer’s Club,” Fox says. “[The admiral] replied, ‘How about [modeling the character after] my CNA rep?’”
Fox was called into the admiral’s office to meet Bruckheimer, and McGillis’ character became Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood, civilian instructor and Maverick’s girlfriend. Fox worked with McGillis so that she could make her role more realistic...”
I must disagree with Steyn on this one.
Much more likely, hollywood will be full of movies in which the aging hero is pursued by women young enough to be his daughter. We have plenty of those already. Think Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Woody Allen...
Maybe that’s why I find Jon Hamm’s character Don Draper in “Mad Men” so appealing. I remember men like him when I was a kid. Not the womanizing, but the suave coolness. The show may be intended to be an indictment of the olden days—”look at those people, smoking, drinking and cheating on their wives”—but I have to admit I watch it with a touch of nostalgia.
LOL. Nicole Kidman and brain surgery is as believable as Tom Cruise and, well, sanity.
I don't know.
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