[mojito]

The man is always a pleasure to read.

[nothingnew]

Perhaps that situation will continue indefinitely, until everyone on screen looks like Dr Christmas Jones, and everyone in the European and Canadian and Japanese audiences looks like Ethel Barrymore’s grandmother. Or perhaps Hollywood will rediscover the charms of age, put its hat on, and go to work.

Last paragraph of another brilliant piece. To co-opt a line from a song: "When we ever learn"...

FMCDH(BITS)

[LS]

"Think of a gated community in Florida: To be sure, once every so often they get up a party to go see Tony Danza in dinner theatre."

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."

[GOP_Raider]

Dougan...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.

Being "young" myself, there are certain things you shouldn't reproduce. A Warhol painting, maybe. But not a Sinatra.

[henkster]

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.

[Gondring]

Not necessarily ridiculously young, like Dr Christmas Jones, the nuclear physicist played by Denise Richards a couple of Bond films back.

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! :-)

[dennisw]

Steyn really gets it on the cultural levels. I addition to the political and economic

[Ramius]

But one thing does remain certain: Men aren’t wearing enough hats.

[Cacique]

btt

[dr_lew]

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 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

[sinanju]

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...

[Fu-fu2]

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.

[keepitreal]

“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?’”

I don't know.

[SuziQ]

I'd never thought about the book behind the movie Children of Men, but did like the movie. Reading that it was written by P.D. James, I immediately went to my Library System website and ordered it up to be sent to my library.

[x]

“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. ...”

Well, kind of.

People wanted to be adults in the 1950s. Since then, they've wanted to stay children.

But if Mad Men is accurate, there was an anxiety about not being as young as one once was even then. The younger guys envied Don Draper in a way that the young don't envy their elders today, but Don could see that the salad days wouldn't last forever.