Foreign films are another matter. Sometime around 2000, I went to see a screening of Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke," and was blown away. Something about it resonated with me, and to this day, it's still my favorite movie ever, live-action or animated. It started a love for Japanese anime and manga that continues for me to this day. Like you describe, some or most of them are pretty pedestrian, but there are some brilliant gems among them too.
It seems to me that this country just has too much power, and too much political extremism in pursuit of that power. Since the late 1960s, the American TV bard seems to despise his audience, and treats them with either condescension or outright malice. The wokery and projected disempowerment seems to have begun then.
In Japan, and in pre-late-1960s Western popular culture, the stories focus on individuals striving to improve themselves within a healthy community in which the people around them have their place and their own rightful requirements. In post-1960s America though, the hero's support network is "diverse," and his natural community is generally depicted as a stupid and oppressive enemy to be overcome.
That's where I think they began the destruction of the American community and the potency of its free citizenry. When you compare what our imagination leaders serve now with what we had before and with what you find for countries that still have a healthy model of cultural production, the difference becomes obvious.
I've tried really hard to like Miyazaki's work and the only film of his I could get into was "Ponyo" and I loved it. I find Japanese film and TV a very mixed bag and to me some of the masters are seriously overrated, but others move me to my core. Both the 1962 original and the 2011 remake of "Harakiri" are to me exceptional. The TV version of the manga "Erased" was matchless.
Re American TV of this era (I guess a flexible term), for me "The X-Files" is an achievement of such breathtaking scope and quality that nothing can compare and everything else seems so lesser.
But some Korean stuff comes close. Anything that really makes me cry--full marks. And a few Korean TV shows had me sitting here genteelly sobbing.
Foreign films are another matter. Sometime around 2000, I went to see a screening of Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke," and was blown away. Something about it resonated with me, and to this day, it's still my favorite movie ever, live-action or animated. It started a love for Japanese anime and manga that continues for me to this day. Like you describe, some or most of them are pretty pedestrian, but there are some brilliant gems among them too.
It seems to me that this country just has too much power, and too much political extremism in pursuit of that power. Since the late 1960s, the American TV bard seems to despise his audience, and treats them with either condescension or outright malice. The wokery and projected disempowerment seems to have begun then.
In Japan, and in pre-late-1960s Western popular culture, the stories focus on individuals striving to improve themselves within a healthy community in which the people around them have their place and their own rightful requirements. In post-1960s America though, the hero's support network is "diverse," and his natural community is generally depicted as a stupid and oppressive enemy to be overcome.
That's where I think they began the destruction of the American community and the potency of its free citizenry. When you compare what our imagination leaders serve now with what we had before and with what you find for countries that still have a healthy model of cultural production, the difference becomes obvious.
I've tried really hard to like Miyazaki's work and the only film of his I could get into was "Ponyo" and I loved it. I find Japanese film and TV a very mixed bag and to me some of the masters are seriously overrated, but others move me to my core. Both the 1962 original and the 2011 remake of "Harakiri" are to me exceptional. The TV version of the manga "Erased" was matchless.
Re American TV of this era (I guess a flexible term), for me "The X-Files" is an achievement of such breathtaking scope and quality that nothing can compare and everything else seems so lesser.
But some Korean stuff comes close. Anything that really makes me cry--full marks. And a few Korean TV shows had me sitting here genteelly sobbing.