Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
the women. The women, by contrast, are neurotic, driven, Screen ...
...Hollywood...
...Pastoral Counseling...
...That's your whole identity...
...imagine they were somehow imposed on the station, rather one night, a low, tracking camera on her feet is accompanied than bought from it, and at a very substantial price...
...It knows something about how people to the Lifestyle That Can't Keep Its Mouth Shut...
...They are samples of has to tolerate, since Simon himself does...
...Stigwood, who also produced Saturday Night Fever and It is worth noting that, while moral controversies have Grease...
...The gambit from Jane Fonda's role in the first of the film's four Beverly Hills Hotel, which is the setting for Simon's new stories to Elaine May's role in the last one...
...Their emotional traumas, though funny, need to be O.F.M...
...The only thing in this flick that feels heavier than become a fair subject for treatment, politics remains largely Travolta's eyelids is Stigwood's hand on the tiller...
...Among the teachers: Pierre Babin, O.M.L...
...In all fairness to Simon, though, it must Daddy...
...WORKSHOP June to Simon than upwardly mobile blacks and middle-class Jews...
...the stuff for the pit, the slapstick-while the WASPs do A telltale sign of Simon's uncertainty with Hannah or Didrawing-room comedy, the material aimed at the loges, the anah is to be heard in a-phoniness that their lines sometimes repartee...
...The irony by disco sounds...
...is interesting to see how Simon peoples the place...
...There are certain complex issues-homosexuality, racism-that may hinge on things about this film which mark it as the work of Robert morals...
...With a convert's bigotry, Wagner at one point shows him doubled up with pain in his television has rushed into controversy with all the fervor and room, because she gives us no context for this scene first she righteousness that moral trendiness commands...
...John O'Grady...
...He plays this role just the way he did the ones in Saturday Night Fever and Grease-as a kind of man-child, cooing with OHN MORLEY once wrote that "those who treat politics and heavy-lidded Italian sexiness half the time, and whining ado- morality apart will never understand the one or the other...
...S.J., taken more seriously, and as characters they show us more of James DiGiacomo, S.J., Alexa Suelzcr...
...Thus Jane Fonda and Alan Alda, a divorced couple have...
...They even build a sand castle and throw bottles with messages in them into the ocean...
...Like the first twenty minutes of Saturday Night Fever, the court, or the studio, and television has grown to be obviously first twenty minutes of this film, when Strip is trying to pick up titillated by the administration of entertainment shock...
...tionship with "Strip" ends the way it began, during a phone It is interesting, now that the networks have begun to look at call from her husband...
...You Trisha and getting nowhere, are ironic and likable...
...May plays a woman comedy, California Suite, is an apt version of Paradise...
...Michael Fahey, S.J...
...The morning after she begins sleeping with him, she finds him outside with a stray puppy he's adopted, as a companion for one she owns...
...Susan The provocative result is that we see the men as very :Auto...
...Morality, or any consensus about She pants...
...Her aggressive pursuit of a career makes it think...
...Stephen Doyle...
...After verly Hills matron who is disaffected with her marriage, and that, moment by moment was the only way I could get through "Strip" (John Travolta), a teenage runaway who picks her up...
...They are the characters with whom Simon is most preoccupied, clearly, and just as clearly the ones he needs some defense mechanisms against...
...intended (mistakenly) as one of her story's poignant moments, There are certain foibles of American life that fascinate that her current boyfriend has "the second best mind I've met Simon, but when he is dealing with ethnic groups he seems to in this country since Adlai Stevenson...
...They are both competitive and caring...
...Moral writer or antique-dealer husbands, these women are more real Theology...
...Political advertisethey do over and over, which may be the reason we get a ments are usually sandwiched between so many official disreprise here of Travolta's pavement-pounding opening to claimers and protests of indifference that the viewer might Saturday Night Fever...
...Whereas Simon is at ease with the HUMANITY SIMONIZED AND TRAVOLTED homosexuality of the character played by Michael Caine, Sidney, he seems definitely on edge with the mere indepenG OING to a Neil Simon comedy is a little like watching God dence of Hannah...
...When it turns out that what we saw are loud and ubiquitous, and have acquired a certain popular was grief and fear over the killing of a friend, we have to go appeal, they can be examined from their own absolute vantage through the same change of attitude toward him as Trisha...
...Some of Hannah's he needs to wrestle a drunk hooker around his suite so his wife, lines are equally tinny, as when she tells her ex-, in what is Elaine May, won't discover her...
...Book of Gepesis, they lack fine detail in the way that the work California Suite might be thought of as a movie that runs the of someone used to thinking in generalities always does...
...She sighs...
...Old Testament...
...Michael's College...
...It's a policy that makes the Winooski, Vermont characters very one-dimensional...
...home with the Elaine May character, perhaps because she's In California Suite the ethnics provide the broad humor- just the sort of woman he never has to his home anymore...
...When audience, how times have changed...
...05404...
...or M.A.T...
...James Dunning and others...
...beyond the scope of the networks...
...Here there ct often used the clever expedient of combining the two on are only four things she can do, acting not being among them...
...Thomas Simon's actual feelings about people...
...They have to get physical to get that strangers will overhear and envy her-the sort who goes laughs, just as Jewish businessman Walter Matthau does when around overstating her case all the time...
...5-10...
...John McKenna...
...As in most Neil Simon plays, you pays your money be admitted that God has also been accused lately of not being and you takes your choice...
...gious Education, Audio-Visual...
...These heroines are his defense mechanisms against a certain sort of woman he no doubt meets all the time-meets more and CALIFORNIA SOUR more-in his own life...
...RETREAT: Simon may write for the latter, but he hangs out with the Aug...
...16 February 1979: 81 Wagner, the' writer-director of Moment by Moment, does it as she gives in, the movie caves in...
...In California though, he only bungles this badly once in a while...
...lescently the rest...
...NOW, MORAL ISSUES Whether Travolta has any acting talent is still impossible to HOMOSEXUALITY AS CHIC MALADY, ETC...
...C.M., Patrick Granfield...
...The networks makes it easy for us to believe he must be a junky going seem to operate on the premise that so long as points of view through "cold turkey...
...If Moment by Moment is consistently, relentlessly, throughout her whole movie...
...Donal O'Doherty...
...Courses in ReliSmith), the movie star...
...Whatever once worked for them though they were afraid of contamination...
...Winooski...
...In fairness to Simon, have a policy df only one foible to a customer...
...Lily Tomlin, on the other hand, is clearly Television has usually preferred to ignore both, and has in capable of acting, though not in a turkey like this...
...Price per credit $70...
...Paul Couture, laid-back (it's the appropriate California term), and very calm, S.S.E., St...
...The daughter has run away to California, and especially unequal...
...New Testament...
...degree, for special students, for auditors, for enrichment...
...what the people who made it think love is like, it's no wonder At the bleeding, throbbing heart of Wagner's picture is a the only thing that comes off in their picture is a little aggravaMay-September love story about Trisha (Lily Tomlin), a Be- tion, bitterness and disappointment at the beginning...
...17-22: Evangelization for Adolescents and Adults...
...But as soon know, I happen to be gay," has become an intermission line Commonweal: 82...
...Yet it who hangs on to her husband by overlooking his infidelity...
...The WASPs, by contrast...
...Liturgy...
...Producers under censure...
...It makes Dianah couple of black doctors on vacation with their wives, have seem the sort of person who says things too loudly in the hope sight gags for the most part...
...But point...
...the same untouchable coin...
...Systematics, Christology...
...Spirituality...
...It suffers from the same failing as it has gone from being the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name Saturday Night Fever...
...Television Then there's the scene where "Strip" and Trisha have a moment of truth in her California hot tub-By Love Possessed played on a porn-flick set...
...Edward Braxton, Walter Smith...
...Their relationship has just about every cliche in it known to COLIN L. WESTERBECK,.JR...
...Needless to say, in all media, this, the film shows us little...
...In the past, television Although Wagner was unable to give the performances of preferred to be be moralistic in matters about which there isn't Ton-din and Travolta any direction, the weakness of Moment much argument-lying, cheating, robbery-and to avoid by Moment may not be entirely her fault...
...It turns out Fonda plays a woman who loses her daughter by being a that all men are not equal in the sight of Simon, and women are success...
...Write: Rev...
...aside from occasional glimpses of Wagner's intentions like Homosexuality is an example...
...It is Hannah who is Creation, and like so many of the characters one meets in the the threat to the institution of marriage, not Sidney...
...Simon himself is obviously more at an Equal Opportunity employer...
...And she klinks, from all the it, is a kind of political decision, so they believe, and'therefore chunky silver jewelry she wears...
...Everyone Simon imagines belongs in Paradise, impossible for her ex-husband to live with her...
...Along with their screen- Ecclesiology...
...His characters are the prototypes for a million imper- flirtations with other men are something his wife Dianah just fect copies whom we all know in real life...
...O.S.B...
...But Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor, as a enough, but as sentiment it's even clumsier...
...The women, by contrast, are neurotic, driven, Screen suspicious and domineering...
...tell...
...As exposition the line is awkward with her husband...
...But Sidney's too...
...former...
...As her plane lands in L.A., for instance, Dianah says to meeting again for the first time in years, get to spend all their Sidney, "Just think, nine years at the Old Vic, a dozen productime back-chatting each other, as do Michael Caine and Mag- tions of Shakespeare, and now I may receive an award for a gie Smith, who plays a British actress attending the Oscars silly little comedy...
...If that dog had known what he was getting into, he'd have toughed it out with the ASPCA...
...All attitudes hustle (or Hustle) each other, but nothing about genuine feel- about it-from Anita Bryant leftward-have had their day in ing...
...this movie...
...June 24-Aug...
...3, 1979 are two-dimensional, especially women like Hanna (Jane Six-week and three-week courses in the comfort of scenic VerFonda), who is'a magazine editor, and Dianah Barry (Maggie mont...
...Or if you're a Jewish mother, you're ST...
...They internalize foibles as conflict...
...O'Meara, O.P...
...Like Trisha, we don't trust "Strip" at first...
...is that moral controversies have much greater implications Originally Wagner's script may not have been so soft and than political campaigns, and it is probable that television, in fluffy as it seems now...
...As Trisha hunts for "Strip" in L.A...
...MICHAEL'S COLLEGE over-indulgent with your husband...
...The networks have always recoiled from it as tend to be Johnny One-Notes...
...For M.A...
...Vestigial signs of something with more dealing with moral complexities, does not quite know what it shape to it appear at certain moments, as when Trisha's rela- has gotten into...
...Phone: very much at peace with themselves, and very supportive of (802) 655-2000...
...She squeaks...
...And there are one or two nicely ambig- certain moral debates, and demand a certain maturity of their ous touches...
...Jane Suite, if you're a black man, you're over-competitive...
Vol. 106 • February 1979 • No. 3
