There's a good tribute to Hal Ashby over at Slate:
This should have been a big year for Hal Ashby. In February, a 30th anniversary edition of his masterpiece, Being There, was released. The following month brought the first full-lengthbiography. In June, a long-lost director's cut of one of his maligned movies from the 1980s appeared on DVD (albeit to still-tepid reviews). Tributes and retrospectives have been held around the country: Ashby, who died in 1988, would have turned 80 last week.
Yet Ashby's legacy remains a little fuzzy. If any adjective has affixed itself to the director, it is probably "quirky," an epithet he owes partly to Being There—the tale of a seemingly autistic gardener who becomes a high-profile economic pundit and prospective presidential candidate—but mostly to Harold and Maude, from 1971, which stars Bud Cort as a suicidal young man smitten by a fun-loving, 79-year-old Holocaust survivor (Ruth Gordon). Maude teaches Harold to thumb his nose at authority and do as he feels. The movie flopped in its initial release but was quickly revived on college campuses and has charmed an unending wave of undergraduates ever since.
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