The Talkies / The China Syndrome and Real Life
Yagoda, Ben
THE TALKIES by Ben Yagoda The China Syndrome and Real Life The China Syndrome is a bang-up thriller, among other reasons because it has such a good feel for work--both what people do and the...
...The China Syndrome is a valuable reminder that, contra the disaster genre, tense cinematic drama is not directly proportional to the amount of carnage and rubble on screen...
...He's the kind of fellow who will say "But seriously" every other sentence, and who takes a preposterously scientific interest in the craft of comedy, In Real Life BrOoks plays "Albert Brooks," a smooth-talking director who decides to make a documentary about a year in the life of a typical American family...
...This is both drama of the highest order and a convincing tribute to the journalistic potential of TV...
...Mimi Leonard, a tall blonde who made her debut at the St...
...It punctures, especially, the absurd notion that the people under scrutiny can act as if cameras weren't trained on them 24 hours a day...
...It may have taken even more self22 . The American Spectator May 1979 restraint to subordinate personality to plot...
...It presents a nightmare world where there is no "real life" except media...
...Jane F0nda and Michael Douglas, playing the TV reporter and cameraman who inadvertently discover that something is amiss at the plant, are a parallel professional pair: She, a careerist accustomed to covering dancing telegrams and tigers' birthday parties, doesn't want to make waves at first, while he, with the arrogance that is acquired behind the scenes, comes out fighting...
...Typical father Warren Yeager (Charles Grodin), a veterinarian, kills a horse on the operating table because he's worried about how he looks...
...Comedian Albert Brooks' new film, RealLife, also takes TV as its text...
...Contributing to the film's success as well are some things that it doesn't do...
...A final reason for the film's powerful suspense has to be the magnitude of the danger: We're told that a large hunk of California could be contaminated...
...He loves the...
...At $60 a ticket (or $45 or $32 for balcony seats), the price was a steal...
...As far as I'm concerned," Rubin addressed the audience of 1,500, "The Event already is a terrific success, and you've made it a great success...
...thereupon he offers "Brooks" a bribe to leave that scene out of the final cut...
...A young woman sidled up to me, smiling...
...I have a very balanced, natural diet--except that I use artificial sweeteners...
...If the license is delayed, even slightly," one of them says, "our cash flow dries up...
...Bridges and company seem to realize that such questions are beyond the film's range, and, although expressions like "feedwater leak," "turbine trip," "isolati0n valve," and "Take it up to 110" are continually bandied about, they are used more for conveying atmosphere than information...
...With wide-eyed Joseph P. Duggan is an editorial writer for the Greensboro [N...
...Yet when presented with the right story, TV can offer a journalistic immediacy unavailable to any other medium...
...It restrains itself, for one, from making a political statement against nuclear power--beyond a general and resounding BE CAREFUL, which the events of late March proved to be entirely justified...
...The Event, billed as "the first awareness extravaganza," offered fourteen and a half hours of "human potential actualization," featuring as speakers or "group facilitators" such luminaries as Werner Erhard, George Carlin, "Bucky" Fuller, Dick Gregory, and Masters and Johnson...
...Cook .and Mike Gray, have not only shown us how it works (a territory uniquely suited to films and too often ignored by them), but they have captured the essential quality of video reporting: It is woefully given to oversimplification and distortion...
...only when he moans, "I love that plant," with a hanging gardenia in the background, do things sink to the bathetic...
...The exhibit for an outfit called Custom Supplements, Inc., for instance, was pushing customized, pre-packaged vitamins in order to spare health-conscious folks the "opening and closing of bottles twice a day, which is The American Spectator May 1979...
...The subject today is health, your body, relationships, and sexuality...
...news as much as Lemmon loves nuclear power...
...Initially Douglas is completely mistaken about what the trouble is, and he's much too quick with his charges of cover-up and conspiracy...
...Nicholas Ball in 1966 and married J erry Rubin last year, chimed in: "Today is also about positivity, openness, and sharing...
...The lobby of the auditorium was a state fair for "human potential" types...
...While Brooks is an expert practitioner, his film is seriously flawed by its length: After an hour and three-quarters we have long since wearied of what is, after all, one joke, and he has taken to repeating himself, Real Life would have made an ideal hour-long TV special-which, being the same in form as "An American Family," would have provided yet another layer of self-reference...
...In the final scene of the film, Fonda, after being holed up, and nearly blown up, in the control room with Lemmon, goes on camera, convinces Bramley at least to suggest that the company may have been in the wrong, and tearfully pulls the story together...
...But in fact such a choice was not merely convenient...
...Sun Myung Moon...
...An American Family" is something of a dead horse itself, and Real Life is more than straight satire...
...The portrait of the power trade is not even credible, but that of TV news is extraordinarily perceptive...
...This happens to be true to character and theme, but it also suggests that Brooks may have as large an ego as "Brooks...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS by Joseph P. Duggan j erry Rubin's Body earnestness, Rubin continued...
...Director James Bridges and his co-writers, T.S...
...Lemmon wears the perpetually pained look' he has favored in recent years, but it's justified by the pressures he faces...
...Yet in the end catastrophe is averted...
...I like my body," she told me, "because I'm tall, I have good posture, I don't eat junk food...
...THE TALKIES by Ben Yagoda The China Syndrome and Real Life The China Syndrome is a bang-up thriller, among other reasons because it has such a good feel for work--both what people do and the way it defines them...
...The China Syndrome may send as many resumes into the news room as All the President's Men sent into the city room...
...1 ~176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176 Jerry Rubin strode to the center of the stage at the Julia Richmond Auditorium on New York's Upper East Side, a chilled bottle of Perrier water in his hand...
...Brooks' comedy, filled with false bravado and rickety shrieks, is a creature of the airwaves...
...Ben Yagoda is a free-lance writer living in New York...
...Spearheaded by Animal House, deadhorse jokes have become a minor trend...
...As co-director Jerry Rubin put it, it was a "kind of California event in the middle of New York City...
...The archetypal Yippie, now a full decade past the distrusted age of 30, was short of hair and clean-shaven...
...On a visit to the gynecol...
...Real Life is both the documentary itself and a film about its production (under "Brooks' " loony notions about art and reality, everything is permitted...
...The PR man for the nuclear plant where all hell breaks loose (James Hampton)is archetypal-smarmy, unintelligent, and effective...
...Rubin led the audience in several "games," one of which was to have everyone approach a stranger and tell him "what you like and what you don't like about your own body...
...In the minds of Bridges and company, it is precisely because it is controlled by evil, profit-minded capitalists that nuclear power is dangerous...
...One might suppose that the filmmakers were in a bind: Since atomic energy as such couldn't plausibly be the villain, something had to provide the danger--and the logical candidate is capital's greed...
...What animates the film is the conflict of 9th e two industries...
...The film does go askew, however, in making the company owners unbelievably dastardly...
...He wore a bulky wool pullover and tapered slacks that could have come from Bloomingdale's, a red carnation, and a serene-but-somehow-goofy smile that made him resemble the followers of the Rev...
...It's also a right-on-target send-up of PBS's "An American Family...
...In The China Syndrome character is a function of work, and the actors--particularly Fonda, who is superb--illuminate this important theme...
...C. ] Record andis Americana editor of The American Spectator...
...This peculiarly serf-conscious brand of humor is limited in scope and almost cannibalistic in method, but with Mel Brooks spoofing movies, "Saturday Night Live" TV shows, and Steve Martin stand-up comics, it's clearly ~ la mode...
...What I don't like about my body is that I'm overweight...
...Making sure we don't forget that show-biz is everywhere, "Brooks" is on screen-bungling, meddling, editorializing--more often than the Yeagers...
...Miraculously, there isn't a hint of a love interest between Fonda and Douglas (which would have provided a few insurance runs at the box office), or between Fonda and anybody...
...Egged on by the reporters, Lemmon takes the structural flaws he' s found to the airwaves--after the company has refused to listenuhijacks the plant on camera, and ultimately bites the linoleum...
...Wilfred Bramley and Jack Lemmon, as the men in charge of the plant's control room--the hermetically sealed aggregation Of mystifying dials and meters where most of the film's action takes place--are drawn from life, too: a company man who has stayed with the industry through its progression from relatively simple electricity to a technology he cannot fathom, and a specialist who is more loyal to nuclear power than to the firm...
...ogist, "Brooks" assures Jeanette Yeager that he "won't film anything that will embarrass you--I'm locked into a PG," but the doctor covers his face and throws the crew out: He's been exposed as a blackmarket baby-dealer by "60 Minutes...
Vol. 12 • May 1979 • No. 5
