Brudnoy's Film Index
Brudnoy, David
David Brudnoy Brudnoy's Film Index • • ^ All Screwed Up: Monstrously translated title (in Italian, Tutto a Posto e Niente in Ordine, literally " everything ' s in order but nothing works") for...
...But even a Wertmilller mediocrity surpasses most other films on the screen today, and this one offers many blazingly comic moments as well as some useful lessons about the eternal conflict between the sexes...
...Seven Beauties: The brightest movit of the new year, the latest from Lin: Wertmiiller, and an absolute knock-out Giancarlo Giannini excels as the Neapoli tan would-be Valentino, whose activities on behalf of his squalid family's "honor' lands him first in jail, then in an asylum and finally in the war...
...Yet there is an engaging quality to the whole abysmal farce, and that's the worst thing about it: it works...
...36 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 197i...
...predictabilities, into whose routine slink...
...Special Section: Costa Gavras re turns, this time laying aside (one pre sumes, temporarily) his by now quit, tawdry crusade to distort history for th, greater glory of the Left, picking up in stead the degrading story of Vichy col laborationism, but pickling it in the thin nest juice...
...They play tricks on him...
...The movie is wildl' funny and, simultaneously, horrifyingl' tragic, and its excellence pervades ever frame, every musical selection, every nu ance of acting...
...Hedda: Ibsen's classic receives an icy interpretation in this adaptation of the Royal Shakespeare Company stage production...
...Exasperatingly denuded of any real turn-on, not to mention its total absence of believable dialogue, intriguing characters, or insightful thought...
...The amorality is this thick, and the violence is knee-high, but there are some finely conceived scenes, almost ballet-like, wherein the gore is transformed into something of symbolic interest...
...All three smugly revel in their des tinies, while the actors invigorate their roles with whatever vitality is possible it a movie manifesting almost total stasis...
...Next Stop, Greenwich Village: Paul Mazursky's latest, yet another installment in the coming of age of Paul Mazur-sky...
...Along the way it is a seemingly endless trip...
...Wertmuller's leftism doesn't lead her to distort reality—the most horrifying scene takes place at a wretched abortion clinic, whence one of the heroines flees in disgust and terror—but it does permeate the film to the extent of satirizing the upper classes and siding with the proletariat...
...The bad-dies get theirs in the end, and the good guy abandons the ratty ship...
...No cliche is left unused, no bathetic possibility is skirted, no opportunity to chisel a stereotype into stone is passed by...
...Incarcerated in Nazi concentration camp supervised 13: three hundred pounds of monstrosity (Shirley Stoler), he seeks escape from at almost inevitable death by trying to se duce the amazon...
...Inside Out: Telly Savalas, Robert Culp, James Mason, and Aldo Ray want gold...
...All about a would be wayward lass, her separated folks, he lovers and their lovers, and the compli cations arising therefrom...
...A long-imprisoned Nazi knows where it is...
...They are very clever...
...Box 877, Bloomingon IN 47401...
...Less a slat than a flubbed peck on the cheek...
...The Slap: Notable mainly for the ap pearance of Isabelle Adjani (of The Stor of Adele H.) in her second film to react these shores, and for the expectably soli( performances by Lino Ventura and Anni, Girardot as her parents, this Claude Pino teau movie falls into the trap of trying t• substitute wry intentions for an all too ap parent insignificance...
...Helmut Berger...
...A total wash-out—but watch it get the big push, assuming that Paramount cannot be talked out of carrying it any further...
...The Romantic Englishwoman: Glenda Wanted: Essays The Alternative pays handsomely for sprightly and informative articles on public policy, written in plain English, by undergraduate and graduate students in economics and business...
...Glenda Jackson's Hedda Gabler betrays no hint of warmth, accentuating, to the extreme of excluding any other attribute, her disdain for anyone but herself...
...Botched, but saved by Wertmiiller's enormous talent...
...Everyone pales beside Jackson's burning power...
...a cynical gigolo...
...Good grief...
...The Killer Elite: James Caan and Robert Duvall as agents of Corn-Teg (read: CIA subsidiary) whoserdoings occasion, with naive wonder, the cinematic question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes...
...Like the play, the film closes in on itself in the heavy-laden drawing room of the asinine George Tesman, whither he has brought his new wife, Hedda, and whence she ponders correctives to her imagined role as prisoner of the "grotesque farce" of conventional marriage...
...Shelley Winters as the Jewish Mother to inspire genocide, Ellen Greene and Lois Smith as relatively interesting Village characters, Christopher Walker as the sub-zero-intensity WASP egoist, Antonio Fargas as a Negro homosexual named Bernstein Chandler (you got it), and Lenny Baker as the Mazursky-like aspirant, Larry Lapinsky...
...Jackson and Michael Caine portray duti fully marrieds bored silly by each other...
...Thomas rubs the woman's sexual fiber...
...David Brudnoy Brudnoy's Film Index • • ^ All Screwed Up: Monstrously translated title (in Italian, Tutto a Posto e Niente in Ordine, literally " everything ' s in order but nothing works") for an ambitious though flawed film by Lina Wertmiiller about a group of young country lads and lassies making do and making out in the big city, here Milan...
...Even more clever is the moviegoer who stays home...
...What could have been a devas tating probe of justice perverted for ex pediency's sake emerges as a ponderous almost amateurish drag...
...Lifeguard: Somehow Paramount Pictures has agreed to distribute this .impossibly boring surf-and-sudsy-sex soap opera about a mid-thirtyish beach boy (subspecies: lifeguard) and his girl friends, barely post-pubescent as well as mature, not to mention his homilies to the junior-grade lifeguards, the sand-dune cut-ups, and assorted wierdoes on the beach...
...and arouses her novelist husband's curi osity, his researcher's quest for new ma terial...
...If interested, send ideas for suggested article and a sample of your writing to Adam Meyerson, . The Alternative, P.O...
...They struggle to get him to tell...
...Wertmiiller's master piece, and one of the most remarkably movies in decades...
Vol. 9 • April 1976 • No. 7
