Word: middlebrow
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...Another American exile, Joseph Losey, was making films under pseudonyms.) When the young critic Francois Truffaut saw Rififi, he wrote, "From the worst crime novel I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best film noir I have ever seen." Dassin's Euro-movies had a vogue among middlebrow U.S. reviewers, who might have thought he was French. (Pronounce it Zhool Da-saaan.) The hipper critics knew better. He was "strained seriousness" to Andrew Sarris. On seeing Phaedra - an updated Greek tragedy that threw Anthony Perkins into the arms of stepmother Mercouri - Pauline Kael compared it invidiously...
...start a revolution. Broadway continues to do robust business; total attendance climbed 2.7% last year, to a record high of 12.3 million. But the vast majority of hit musicals since Rent, from The Producers to Jersey Boys, still earn their money the old-fashioned way: by catering to comfortably middlebrow, middle-aged audiences...
...surprise - the show at Kew is a reminder of Moore's enduring credibility. It has its share of Moore at his most middlebrow: the white fiberglass version of Large Reclining Figure that Moore ordered up in 1984 - a bloviating enlargement of what had been a suave little totem when he first fashioned it in 1938 in gratifying dark lead - belongs at an airport. But set against the greenery of Kew, his way of conflating the curves of the human body with the swells of landscape is effective again. And his two- and three-part reclining figures, like Reclining Figure: Arch...
...Pirates III can be said to have an emotional center - oops, sorry, how did that bit of middlebrow critical jargon worm its way into this context? - it has to do with father figures. They come and they go, causing a good deal of consternation among their offspring. The codger most appreciated by the audience is Keith Richards, well known to be Depp's inspiration for his character. He appears here as Jack Sparrow's old man, and he got a relieved round of applause at the screening I attended. Up to then the audience had been pretending to have...
This sounds like knee-jerk populism, but Price skills are as important to the biggest fish as to penny-scroungers. Quiz-show skills are the stuff of middlebrow success, of the star pupils who do their homework, please their teachers and go on to earn solid middle-manager salaries. But business fortunes are built, like Pick-a-Pair victories, on risk, a little luck and pricing assets: calculating, assessing value and never overbidding. (And against a ticking clock.) People who do that are the ones who amass billions, drive the economy and bankroll politicians. They don't need to know...