He would have been a killer candidate had he ever considered running for public office.Ĭostner has a new film out, Let Him Go, so we’ve taken this opportunity to rank 42 of his performances. Decency, idealism, common sense, a can-do spirit: Costner embodied these qualities with a no-big-deal air. In his prime, he articulated a rugged vulnerability that could make men weepy about his films. Your dad probably enjoys Kevin Costner, and maybe it’s a thing you share with your old man.
#Laid in america movie rating series
In recent years, his greatest success has been with Yellowstone, his Paramount series that caters to the older demographic who has been supporting him since the Dances With Wolves years - the same folks who probably checked out his 2019 Netflix film The Highwaymen. All he’s done since then is keep working, switching between character-actor roles and starring vehicles that were often … well, let’s be generous and call them “interesting.” He would never again capture the Zeitgeist - never again captivate audiences the way Bull Durham or Field of Dreams did - but we feel fairly confident that most moviegoers still have a fairly favorable viewpoint of the actor-director. You know what happened after that: Waterworld severely dented his standing, and then The Postman made him a punch line. And, for a short time, he was the biggest thing in Hollywood.Ĭostner’s cinematic peak was relatively short - the late 1980s to the early 1990s - but he managed to amass two Academy Awards and a string of popular hits during that time period. He’s the dude you wouldn’t mind having a beer with. Bruce Springsteen is one of those guys, and so is Kevin Costner, who for decades has exuded a slightly square persona. There are some celebrities who so seem to represent American masculinity - well, straight, white American masculinity, anyway - that they feel carved out of granite and permanently decked out in blue jeans. “American Graffiti” is not only a great movie but a brilliant work of historical fiction no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie’s success in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant.Photo-Illustration: Vulture, Orion Pictures, Warner Bros. Whole cultures and societies have passed since 1962. Stanley Kauffmann, who liked it, complained in the New Republic that Lucas had made a film more fascinating to the generation now between thirty and forty than it could be for other generations, older or younger.īut it isn’t the age of the characters that matters it’s the time they inhabited. “American Graffiti” acts almost as a milestone to show us how far (and in many cases how tragically) we have come. The Rolling Stones of 1972 would have blown WLS off the air in 1962. Songs like “ Sixteen Candles” and “Gonna Find Her” and “The Book of Love” sound touchingly naive today nothing prepared us for the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later. A character in the movie only realizes his car, parked nearby, has been stolen when he hears the music stop: He didn’t hear the car being driven away. “American Graffiti”‘s sound track is papered from one end to the other with Wolfman Jack’s nonstop disc jockey show, that’s crucial and absolutely right. The options were simple, and so was the music that formed so much of the way we saw ourselves. The options seemed so simple then: to go to college, or to stay home and look for a job and cruise Main Street and make the scene. The teenagers in “American Graffiti” are, in a sense, like that cartoon character in the magazine ads: the one who gives the name of his insurance company, unaware that an avalanche is about to land on him. The great divide was November 22, 1963,and nothing was ever the same again.
Remembering my high school generation, I can only wonder at how unprepared we were for the loss of innocence that took place in America with the series of hammer blows beginning with the assassination of President Kennedy. When I went to see George Lucas’s “American Graffiti” that whole world - a world that now seems incomparably distant and innocent - was brought back with a rush of feeling that wasn’t so much nostalgia as culture shock.
0 kommentar(er)
