Act Your ‘Age’
Okay, you sport fans out there, The Gilded Age is back on our idiot boxes, and it’s a welcome respite from the garbage that untalented directors and writers of today have been shoving down our throats. At least garbage had its uses before it turned to waste, but this recent stuff…words fail me. When was the last time we watched a black man speaking normal English, smiling, and not using the f-word nonstop while threatening to kill somebody white? On our screens, that is. Back in the good old days, screenwriters were terribly good writers with names such as Tennessee Williams, Irwin Shaw, Scott Fitzgerald, Gore Vidal, Tom Stoppard, and Billy Wilder among many other exceptional scribes, and they produced such classics as The Best Years of Our Lives, All About Eve, and Gone With the Wind, the latter with a little help from one Margaret Mitchell.
But I don’t want to dwell on the lack of talent among moviemakers today. (An exception is my friend Michael Mailer’s Hearts of Champions and Cutman, the latter an outstanding film.) It’s obvious that talent and Hollywood have parted ways, hence when a costume drama like The Gilded Age comes along, it’s welcome. Mind you, like Henry James and Edith Wharton before him, The Gilded Age auteur Julian Fellowes—a pretty good social climber himself—does overcook things. In other words, yes, one had to conform back then in order to be invited to Mrs. Astor’s balls, but definitely not as much
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
