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The June Cleaver

Ah, flowery June, when brooks send up a cheerful tune. The Muckdogs won their home opener last night before the largest Opening Day crowd in years. The sun has chased away, or…
Bill Kauffman
June 19, 2013

Ah, flowery June, when brooks send up a cheerful tune. The Muckdogs won their home opener last night before the largest Opening Day crowd in years. The sun has chased away, or at least agreed to coexist with, the clouds. And herewith a piece by yours truly from the Daily Caller about a certain movie that begins its long march across the nation’s Cineplex complex next Friday.

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A stack of three Local Culture journals and the book 'Localism in the Mass Age'

Bill Kauffman

Bill Kauffman is the author of eleven books, among them Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette (Henry Holt), Ain’t My America (Metropolitan), Look Homeward, America (ISI), and Poetry Night at the Ballpark (FPR Books). His next book, Upstaters, is due from SUNY Press in 2026. He is a columnist for The American Conservative and The Spectator World. Bill wrote the screenplay for the 2013 feature film Copperhead. He is a founding editor of Front Porch Republic and has served as a legislative assistant to Senator Pat Moynihan, editor for various magazines and publishers, and vice president of the Batavia Muckdogs, a professional baseball team that was euthanized by Major League Baseball. He lives with his wife Lucine in his native Genesee County, New York.

5 comments

  • Rob G
    12 years ago

    Reading the novel this week, even though I don’t know if the movie will play Pittsburgh or not, or when. But just in case…

    A good recent American film: Jeff Nichols’ Mud. The first run is past, but is very much worth seeing nevertheless.

  • Ray Olson
    12 years ago

    Oh, wait!–I mentioned the three movies I did in my first post as exceptions to the doldrumish tenor of the American films of those times. I know the era is supposed to have been a renaissance for American film, but I just don’t see it. Maybe it’s the ugly fashions of the time, exceeded in emetic hideousness only by those of the rest of the 70s, that makes most of those movies so repulsive to me. I had to wear jeans and blue workshirts near-exclusively for the duration to be able to get through it. Do I exaggerate? Well, yeah.

  • Ray Olson
    12 years ago

    Actually, I didn’t like Zabriskie Point when it came out. It took a retrospective of Antonioni at the Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago to open it up for me. Antonioni radically–radically!–changed his style for Zabriskie Point but had his reasons for doing so that I appreciated after seeing his previous work. I just love his films. If you haven’t seen it, try his first feature, The Story of a Love Affair (Cronica di un amore), which I think of as the best James M. Cain roman noir that Cain never wrote and Hollywood never concocted.

  • Bill Kauffman
    12 years ago

    I’m with you on McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Ray, but–I hesitate to confess this, but didn’t Thoreau say any truth is better than a lie?–I like Zabriskie Point.

  • Ray Olson
    12 years ago

    Yikes! So soon, yet. Looks like I’ll have to go scouring around for the novella (I like to be prepared) and start preparing myself to do something I rarely do and dread worse than the piles, AIDS, gout, GIRD, and hangnails all rolled up in one ball of contusion–see a new American movie during its first run. Only for you, Bill.

    (“from 1969 until the latter part of the ’70s” was the “heyday”, “the golden age” of American movies?????!!!!!! Surely you jest. I was reviewing the things back then, and they almost invariably stuuuuuhhhhhnnnnk! They’re even worse–unwatchable, unbearable–now. OK, Little Big Man . . . Zabriskie Point [done by a furriner, though] . . . McCabe and Mrs. Miller. But I take your point, We DID yack about ’em.)

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