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Entertainment

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

Decades of jokes

By Todd Leopold
CNN

Starsky and Hutch
Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller and a 1974 Ford Torino in "Starsky and Hutch."

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ON CNN TV
Eye on Entertainment" talks about the weekend's happenings on CNN's "Live Today" between 10 a.m. and noon EST Thursday.
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(CNN) -- Will somebody please save the '70s?

They once seemed so promising. Never did life seem as futuristic as it did in, say, 1973: bulbous white chairs, Panasonic ball 'n' chain radios, the look of "Clockwork Orange" and "Silent Running" and "Sleeper" (all set in the future, but reflecting the times) -- sure, it was plastic and sterile and a little haunted, but it was sleek and different, too. It could have gone somewhere.

But a lot of things went wrong in the '70s. The decade was weighted down by Watergate and polyester shirts and WIN buttons and oil crises and big, ugly cars and a sense that civilization was crumbling away -- the view presented in "The French Connection" and "Dog Day Afternoon" and "The Parallax View" and "Network."

And now the '70s are a joke.

When you see the goofy haircuts, clothes and cars of "That '70s Show" or "Starsky and Hutch," you don't think of history, that these were real times in which real people lived. You laugh.

Funny how that happens. The '80s weren't that long ago -- heck, I was in college in the '80s, and I don't feel that old. But now they've been reduced to haircuts, synthesizers and fluorescent parachute pants.

Eye on Entertainment takes a look back.

Eye-opener

Maybe it's all the stuff we have now. You look at movies from the '20s, '30s and '40s, and they don't seem silly. People didn't have houses full of appliances and faddish gimcracks. Even if their hair is funny, we look in with curiosity, because they didn't have 50,000 hair-care products; in fact, they probably washed their hair once a week.

But starting with the '50s, it all becomes part of the pop culture machine -- the hair and the products and the cars and the music -- and there's so much of it, we laugh.

Maybe we laugh to forget what was going on underneath the surface. David Halberstam was moved to write "The Fifties" because he wanted to show there was a lot more happening in that allegedly most placid of decades than we want to remember: McCarthyism and nuclear fears, the beginnings of franchised fast food and hotels, race relations, suburbanization. It wasn't all milkshakes at the drive-in or listening to the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio.

There was a lot underneath the surface of the '70s, too, but that's not what "Starsky and Hutch" is about. It's just a comedic buddy movie with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, with a plot that sets the stage for the TV series starring Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul.

Stiller and Wilson have a good chemistry, and casting Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear was a stroke of genius. From early reviews, the movie is apparently entertaining and sometimes funny, and it has a good time mocking the TV series and the decade in which it was set. There's nothing wrong with any of that.

But it says a lot more about us now than it does about the '70s then.

On screen

• Viggo Mortensen gets out of Middle-earth and into a horse race across the Arabian Desert in "Hidalgo." Omar Sharif co-stars. Opens Friday.

On the tube

• While "American Idol" has been loudly creating the lounge acts of the future, "Nashville Star" has been more quietly creating the country acts of the present. The series' new season begins Saturday, 10 p.m. ET, on USA Network.

• If "Starsky and Hutch" is the faux '70s, then "The Sopranos" is very much now -- no matter when "now" is. Maybe that's because creator David Chase is determined to make a series about real people and real situations -- the season-concluding argument between Tony and Carmela last year was so real it hurt -- and not to make a show about "buying stuff," as he noted in a New York Times interview. The new season begins 9 p.m. Sunday on HBO (like CNN, a division of Time Warner).

Sound waves

• The Von Bondies, the other band Jack White of the White Stripes used to be involved with, gets a big push for their second album, "Pawn Shoppe Heart" (Sire). The album is produced by former Talking Heads keyboardist Jerry Harrison. Due Tuesday.

Paging readers

• That most thoughtful of detectives, Spenser, returns in Robert B. Parker's "Bad Business" (Penguin). Spenser has to investigate a sex ring involving the executives of a sleazy company named Kinergy. Fill in your favorite Wall Street fraud here. Due Monday.

• Edwidge Danticat, who dazzled critics and readers with "Breath, Eyes, Memory," returns with her third novel, "The Dew Breaker" (Knopf). In an uncomfortably topical plot, the book concerns Haitians tortured by the Duvalier regime, and the "dew breaker" -- torturer -- who's now living a quiet life in Brooklyn. Due Tuesday.


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