litlover12

There's a certain kind of old movie, many of which seem to come from the '60s -- you might almost call it a subgenre -- where everything is very bleak and intense and people are constantly yelling at each other. TCM ran two of these back-to-back last night: Splendor in the Grass and The Children's Hour. I watched little bits of them both, but couldn't make it all the way through either one. Modern blockbusters where things are constantly going BANG and BOOM and CRASH and THUD are bad enough, but yelling is just as bad, if not worse. I tried especially hard with the latter movie because it had Audrey Hepburn, but when Shirley MacLaine started shrieking like a fishwife right off the bat, I knew it was no good.

Because I generally look at this sort of thing as so much scenery-chewing, it's a marvel to me that many of these movies are so critically acclaimed. Alec Baldwin was in raptures over Splendor in the Grass before it started, going on about how this was his idea of young love and all that it entails (which, I think, explains a lot about Alec Baldwin). These people have FEELINGS and they are going to TELL YOU ABOUT THEM at the TOPS OF THEIR LUNGS, and I guess for some, that makes them and their experiences especially authentic and important.

All I can say is, give me a film where people have a little self-control and sophistication. If that's inauthentic, then I don't want to be authentic.