By Charles Cassady, Jr.
I was reading the trashy UK tabloids online (where it doesn't count; only buying them off the newspaper rack makes one complicit in the fall of civilization), and there was a big story about how Steven Spielberg says he doesn't watch many of the mainstream movies made in the last 30 years. He prefers the classics, by John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock etc.
Shock! Horror! As the Brits like to say. Personally I don't blame anyone for skipping most of the movies made in the last 30 years, especially 2011 - but the irony of course is that megastar director Spielberg is largely responsible for the commercial-blockbuster aesthete that has shaped mainstream Hollywood shite (another British vulgarity. So is "wanker," but I don't know yet how I'll work that into this column. Maybe I'll save it for a Cleveland City Club address) for more than a quarter-century, ever since his JAWS practically invented the summer "event" mega-picture, and his occasional collaborator George Lucas finished off the 1970s period of cinema for actual grownups with a little thing called STAR WARS.
