Hacker Cinema
The Natural
1984 · Film · 137 min
Directed by Barry Levinson
An unknown middle-aged batter named Roy Hobbs with a mysterious past appears out of nowhere to take a losing 1930s baseball team to the top of the league.
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4 comments on Hacker News
I am attracted to the design of books' covers, first, in used bookstores. I recently picked up an anthology of short stories by Bernard Malamoud (if his name sounds vaguely familiar, he wrote the story upon which the Robert Redford film "The Natural" was based), in a simply but beautifully bound book published in 1953. His works were published in the Atlantic and New Yorker and muliple other periodicals I'd never heard of or had forgotten. His language is absolutely beautiful. Expressive, yet economical. Malamoud was a man who thought about every word (as one would anyway, writing for periodicals), and at every phrase and clause, his work shows it. Reading this collection of short stories, unlike a lot of the mangled prose that passes for fiction nowadays, my mind felt like a hot knife slicing through butter. It has been years since I devoured a book in a single evening.
I mourn the death of this kind of writing. It's utterly unique but very accessible, though recognizing the economy and perfection of certain word choices requires some prior experience with reading truly good material. That is in shorter and shorter supply as time goes by.
And now I fear it will not only disappear altogether, cleverness of the ideas will fall out of fashion in favor of the mediocre sameness that will plague all writing soon.
It is even more worrying that what is defined here as "growth", and in other contexts can be interpreted as "quality", when absent or reduced, leads to a vicious cycle of ever-decreasing quality over time.
Contemporary novels, especially those depicting modern times, are mostly terrible. I recently read a review of one such modern novel in the Financial Times—-the review was very promising—-and decided to buy and read it. Meanwhile, I am listening to audiobooks of classic, mostly forgotten novels from the last 100 years in my native language. What a difference! One could say that there is a selection effect at work, and that would be fair, but the prose, ideas, and creativity are of such superior quality in those classics compared to modern novels that I wonder how and why people read them. Some of the classics are certainly dated, but you can still understand their purpose, their vision.
I see the same phenomenon in music and movies, most of which are pseudo-creative works designed to make money in the short term. Movies and music that is quickly forgotten, shared on social media for a couple of weeks and then gone, forever. Although it may be natural to say “kids these days,” I have the impression that the easiest fruits to pick in terms of creativity have been picked in the last 100-150 years, during which more people have participated in creative fields, and in the end, there is not much else to say or experiment with. I mean, one of the most popular film genres today is the biopic, which often features people who are still alive or have recently passed away. In these films, screenwriters and directors sometimes feel the need to tweak certain facts and timelines to make the whole endeavor a little more creative.
I recently commented on a video in which one of today's most popular singers did not sing during their concert, but simply danced (badly, half-naked) with playback doing 90% of the work. Some were surprised by my astonishment, saying that this is how concerts by these new artists are today. That's the vicious circle: people don't even expect singers to sing anymore.
Technology, on the other hand, continues, at least for now, to push the boundaries.
RIP "Wonderboy" ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Natural_(film)
Roger Ebert on Madsen’s breakout role in Reservoir Dogs:
> One of the discoveries in the movie is Madsen, who has done a lot of acting over the years (he had a good role in “The Natural“) but here emerges with the kind of really menacing screen presence only a few actors achieve; he can hold his own with the fearsome Tierney, and reminds me a little of a very mean Robert De Niro.
RIP MM
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/reservoir-dogs-1992