Hollywood vs. America : popular culture and the war on traditional values /

Demonstrating remarkable timing, Medved (cohost of TV's "Sneak Previews") has come up with an anti-Hollywood jeremiad just in time for the political debate over the entertainment industry's alleged rejection of "family values" (and, yes, he does blast Murphy Brown's out-of-wedlock pregnancy). Medved's premise is that Hollywood's output of "sleaze and self-indulgence" no longer reflects--or even respects--the values held by most Americans. The reason, he maintains, is that the L.A. creative community is out of touch with mainstream America (in other words, it's Quayle's "cultural elite"). Medved targets mostly the film industry, but he also attacks television, the music business, and such customary right-wing scapegoats as the NEA. His litany of plaints includes Hollywood's anti-religious attitude, its assault on the traditional family, glorification of ugliness (reflected in everything from "foul language" to "addiction to violence"), and America-bashing. After a while, Medved's onslaught grows wearying, especially since most of his examples have already been widely condemned elsewhere. Although he quotes a number of well-known (if pass{{‚}}ee) figures like Frank Capra and Mickey Rooney, most of his comments and statistics come from conservative publications and right-wing think tanks. Medved isn't particularly highly regarded among those who read criticism rather than watch it (his main claim to fame in print is as coauthor of The Golden Turkey Awards [Putnam, 1980]). But if, as he claims, tens of millions of Americans see Hollywood as a corrupting enemy, that's a huge potential audience for his book. (Reviewed Sept. 1, 1992)006016882XGordon Flagg

In its glorification of violence and casual sex and in its disparagement of the family, Hollywood is profoundly out of touch with the values and lifestyles espoused by most Americans, charges Medved, a film critic and co-host of PBS's Sneak Previews. Movies and television, he argues, malign marriage and religion, encourage out-of-wedlock births and wallow in ugliness, gore and selfish hedonism--all with devastating social consequences. He also condemns pop music, especially rap, for its obscene lyrics, misogyny and promotion of promiscuity. Medved ( What Really Happened to the Class of '65 ) is frequently wrongheaded or heavy-handed in his criticism. Yet he is often on the mark, and one need not be a conservative or a religious fundamentalist to find much to ponder in his critique, which is chock full of examples of pop culture's gratuitous pandering to the public's worst instincts. Instead of censorship, Medved advocates boycotts and public shaming to force the entertainment conglomerates to act more responsibly. First serial to Forbes and Reader's Digest; author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Film critic Medved, cohost of PBS's Sneak Previews , presents a scathing indictment of Hollywood that is sure to be controversial. Asserting that ``the dream factory has become the poison factory,'' he criticizes Hollywood movies for portraying religion unfavorably, glamorizing violence, and celebrating immorality. Martin Scorcese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) is among the films censured at length, and there are many others whose objectionable scenes are singled out, from Total Recall (1990) to The Prince of Tides (1992). Those who lament America's loss of what lately have been generally called ``family values'' will agree with Medved, while others are likely to dismiss his impassioned text as a windy sermon. A marginal purchase for general collections.-- Richard W. Grefrath, Univ. of Nevada Lib., Reno (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Buried within this overly long, poorly written study of popular culture is an important notion: that TV, movies, and pop music deserve attention for their adverse effects on the moral and cultural life of our time. But Medved (cohost of TV's Sneak Previews; Hospital, 1982, etc.) so often panders to the so-called ``traditional values'' of right-wing Christian fundamentalists that his many genuine insights get lost in all the moral posturing. With a dizzying compulsion for alliterative prose, Medved argues that Hollywood (which here means the entertainment industry, not just film) has, in our time, displayed ``a powerful (and puzzling) preference for the perverse.'' He rightly discerns an antireligious, antifamily, and anti-American bias in a disproportionate amount of the pop culture we consume. He persuasively argues that TV and movie violence can lead to violent behavior among young people. But Medved's prissy attacks on ``bad language'' and ``ugliness'' obscure his more serious intentions. His simple-minded sense of morality leads to all kinds of interpretive misreadings. Incapable of sustained critical analysis, he misinterprets movies such as The Black Robe and The Silence of the Lambs, and he's positively obsessed with The Last Temptation of Christ, blindly accepting the fundamentalist view of the film. Lifeless plot summaries of other films are listed rather than shaped into an argument, and his browbeating prose fails to disguise his tautological reasoning. Never once does he bother to define exactly what a ``wholesome'' and ``conservative'' culture would be, though there is the suggestion that we need movies about Mother Teresa. The author wants to join the new Jeremiahs of ``the culture wars,'' but his Rotarian view of America is closer to Jerry Falwell than Allan Bloom. Medved's tortured syntax and his movie-blurb vocabulary support his notion that too much TV and film watching leads to a decline in literacy.