That was mere joshing on my part, spurred on by my vast amusement at your invoking THFRO (a serviceable if not, by my own standards, particularly memorable piece of popular entertainment) to establish your mise en scène credentials. But really, different flicks for different folks (and folkerts), and if your preferences and mine run to the styles of different eras, nichto problemo: it doesn't mean that your tastes, however misguided, are any reflection on your fine qualities as a human being (cue "Slippery when Sarcastic" sign). Incidentally, the rogues' gallery of flicks I cited (Top Gun, etc) were none of them titles I've actually seen.

As it happens, Woodstock falls outside the period I was referring to when I alluded nostalgically to a more leisurely, more discursive aesthetic of editing. The domestic product had started to become disagreeably frenetic by the mid-sixties.

Now as to Tom Clancy, I stand by [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=88094|my earlier observations]: "bloated, self-indulgent and utterly devoid of literary merit...a smug, parochial, deeply naive and breathtakingly vulgar man." His career describes a curious arc: not the parabola of the typical novelist (although I would not apply this term to Clancy, whose work product is better described as "heavy booklike artifacts"), but a steady descent from his Red October debut to the cringe-inducing (and indifferently-selling) excesses of late titles like The Bear and the Dragon. I speak as one who inherited and read several paperback editions from my late mama: I particularly savor the memory of 1988's Cardinal of the Kremlin, in which the Afghan mujahideen are depicted in heroic colors as, under the benign guidance of the Great White Father in Washington, they kick the asses of the wicked atheistic Rooskie infidels. Hah! Bet Clancy would like that one back!

cordially,