Entertainment Quotes - page 13
What on earth has given opera its prestige in western civilisation - a prestige that has outlasted so many different fashions and ways of thought? Why are people prepared to sit silently for three hours listening to a performance of which they do not understand a word and of which they very seldom know the plot? Why do quite small towns all over Germany and Italy still devote a large portion of their budgets to this irrational entertainment? Partly, of course, because it is a display of skill, like a football match. But chiefly, I think, because it is irrational. "What is too silly to be said may be sung" - well, yes; but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious - these things can also be sung and can only be sung.
Kenneth Clark
Crooning. A reprehensible form of singing that established itself in light entertainment music in about the 1930s. It recommended itself at first to would-be singers without voices who were unable to acquire an adequate technique and later to a large public because anything, however inartistic, is likely to become popular if only it is done often enough by a large enough number of people.
Eric Blom
It would be very convincing to say that there's no hope for movies - that audiences have been so corrupted by television and have become so jaded that all they want are noisy thrills and dumb jokes and images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level. And there's plenty of evidence, such as the success of Alien. This was a haunted-house-with-gorilla picture set in outer space. It reached out, grabbed you, and squeezed your stomach; it was more gripping than entertaining, but a lot of people didn't mind. They thought it was terrific, because at least they'd felt something: they'd been brutalized. It was like an entertainment contrived in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World by the Professor of Feelies in the College of Emotional Engineering.
Pauline Kael
In movies, the balance between art and business has always been precarious, with business outweighing art, but the business was, at least, in the hands of businessmen who loved movies. As popular entertainment, movies need something of what the vulgarian moguls had - zest, a belief in their own instincts, a sentimental dedication to producing pictures that would make their country proud of their contribution, a respect for quality, and the biggest thing: a willingness to take chances. The cool managerial sharks don't have that; neither do the academics. But the vulgarians also did more than their share of damage, and they're gone forever anyway. They were part of a different America. They were, more often than not, men who paid only lip service to high ideals, while gouging everyone for profits. The big change in the country is reflected in the fact that people in the movie business no longer feel it necessary to talk about principles at all.
Pauline Kael
Since the 1920s, grand illusion on stage has been synonymous with the restraint and mutilation of female assistants, as if the first act a lucky mortal, newly endowed with the ability to overturn the laws of the universe, would wish to carry out would be the casual torture of the fairer sex for our entertainment.
Derren Brown
At the beginning [of The X-Files] the pay disparity was massive. But that happens all the time in Hollywood. It's, 'Do this for me, I'll get you a job.' All the stuff in the papers today about people in entertainment who have abused their position... it's built into our society. It's easy to miss and it's easy to get used to it. There are things that are intolerable in today's world, in terms of the perception of women. Whether they're vamps or vixens, the expectation that, if a woman is wearing a short skirt, she's 'asking for it.'
Gillian Anderson
Game theory applies to a very different type of conflict, now technically called a game. The well-known games such as poker, chess, ticktacktoe and so forth are games in the strict technical Bark and counterbark sense. But what makes parlor games games is not their entertainment value or detachment from real life.
Anatol Rapoport
