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November 7, 2003
TT: We get letters
Here are four recent letters to "About Last Night" that caught my eye:
"You're right about the end of the record album, though."
"Peter Jackson and his crew are packing them into theatres with movies more than three hours long, and then selling them (by which I mean ‘us', since I'm part of this crowd) DVDs that take the running time up to four hours. The brothers Wachowski aren't having any problems with public interest in movies well over two hours long. Nor are directors as diverse as Bryan Singer, George Lucas, and Ang Lee.
"But it's not just a matter of the movie pendulum being way over toward the side marked ‘will sit long hours for movies we like'. Boxed sets are doing great business in music and DVDs. Complete Anything collections move well. Likewise, the boom in manga is the result of a bunch of teenagers finding that they're quite willing to commit to many, many volumes of series that hook their attention....
"The passing of the album in music therefore seems less than inevitable to me, and less than a harbinger of general doom in spite of that crabbed little part of my soul eager to say ‘Ha ha, I knew it, the kids are NOT all right.' It's just that, for whatever reason(s), the way albums are put together doesn't seem to grab the attention or sympathy of enough listeners. There's presumably room for someone to do what's been done in film and graphic storytelling and make long works engaging again."
"The fact that they don't make movies like that anymore is a reflection of the poor taste of the current generation of Hollywood people. Don't
go pinning their poor taste on the rest of the country."
"When The Producers first came to Broadway, I always thought that what was nostalgia for my generation was actually part of my parent's victory celebration. After a long horrible war, this was the final insult to the Nazis. I was too young to understand what my parents were laughing at. But they were happy and that was fine with me."
"How strange that this show, in the movies and on stage should mark the end of one world war and the beginning of another."
In case you didn't know it, smart people read this blog.
Posted November 7, 2003 12:27 PM
