Screen
O'Brien, Tom
of young professionals with beautiful large homes and well- kept neighborhoods. Another method of handling small schools which do not seem economically viable to develop by themselves is to build...
...In 1982-83 Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania introduced a bill, to re-use old school buildings...
...I wanted to like The Bosto- nians...
...Or, al- ternatively, as the beta-partner of the hero of The Last StarCommonweal: 504 fighter puts it when "his" younger brother observes him one midnight calmly unscrewing his head, "Go back to sleep...
...Similarly in Newtonville, Massachusetts, Sasaki and Associates successfully converted thirteen condominiums from the handsome Clarion Park school and completed the complex by building twelve additional new townhouses...
...Schools are usually in residential areas...
...The action in many of these films boils down to a simple formula: adolescents have an heroic responsibility to save Western civilization from evil meanies...
...For example, John La Fata in Warren, Michigan, explains that while he "broke even" on the school-to-housing conversion of thirty-five units for the elderly he acquired in the process "for free" land worth $600,000 to $700,000 on which he built 120 two-bedroom units...
...There is usually a playground attached to the school building providing considerable open land around the built-up area...
...Like Redgrave, the movie just sits there, with the implication that all this is somehow worth our interest, and maybe even noble.9 Nothing like James's irony lightens this heaviness, certainly not Red- grave's apparent zeal for the role of social crusader and martyr...
...Except for that, Ghostbusters conforms to pattern: it's Yuppies against the Universe, one more apocalyptic battle between American David and foreign Goliath, and strictly no contest...
...there is something eerie about their detachment...
...These casting choices, however, only create an initial imbalance that every other aspect of the adaptation worsens, spoiling the film's dramatic tension and enervating its tempo...
...For almost a decade following the appearance of naive celebrations like Charles Reich's The Greening of America, neoconservative revisionism roundly condemned the New Left, the counterculture, black power, and third world insurgencies, subjecting those movements to standards their dwindling defenders rejected as hypocritical and "bourgeois...
...And much-better, surely, the saving irony and, one suspects, profound faith of non-academic Charles Morris...
...The only thing "Southern" in Reeve is his archly authentic accent, an elabo- rately dignified drawl that does nothing to hasten the movie's pace...
...Bill Murray, moreover, is perfect in the role of ace Ghostbuster precisely because he pretends to be an older adolescent, a cynical ex-post-grad research associate (tossed out, one notes, from Columbia...
...This bill will defray 80 percent of the cost of renovating schools for public use...
...instead, he pursues Verena, partly in lust and partly in revenge for the destruction of Southern chivalry by Northern "ideas" in the war...
...Unfortunately, Olive also brings Basil to one of Verena's lectures, hoping to convert him to sympathy toward feminism...
...Fourth, schools often evideace ingenious and imaginative design...
...You're just having a bad dream...
...No film adaptation has to be faithful to the novel on which it is based...
...Third, good density...
...Insofar as projects are private for- profit ventures, they can be conventionally financed and mar- keted as rentals or condominiums...
...Eight, they save time...
...James's original story had no particularly sympathetic characters, but was, at least, balanced...
...Yet, as ugly as Basil's motives are, James makes Boston little better: it seems the headquarters of quacks, charlatans, and professional crusaders looking for a cause...
...The filmmakers may have sensed this: they have at least added an ending that 21 September 1984:505 shows Olive finally taking public action...
...Unfortu-nately, The Bostonians needed far more, particularly tighter structure and energetic pacing...
...Things move slowly in Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala productions --slowly but thoughtfully, with delicious attention to antique settings, sensuous color, and authentic costume...
...G IVEN Tills context, it's easy to understand how some critics get excited over the rare serious film, and are accordingly tempted to overpraise it...
...And ninth, marketability...
...Or take The Last Starfighter, where a teenager living in a trailer park plays video spaceship battles so well that he is dragged to another galaxy for the real thing --a medley of motifs from War Games (again), Tron, and Star Wars...
...By the 1970s social discipline was eroding so rapidly that fashion condemned the whole of middle- class culture as the "culture of nar- cissism...
...In the long run, though it proved ephemeral, the hippie movement was profoundly significant, portending as it did the erosion of liberal values that has sustained bourgeois society, the I character type that had been its foundation, and the ethic that had undergirded efforts to accomplish its reform...
...I found it a bore...
...hence also spin-offs like Gremlins ( E.T...
...With pro- duction costs so inflated, especially because of reliance on special effects, experiment and innovation have become pro- hibitively risky, and studios stick to sure bets at the risk of snores...
...It is probably symptomatic that Allen J. Matusow, professor of American his- tory and dean of humanities at Rice Uni- versity, the most "established" historian THE UNRAVELING OF AMERICA: A HISTORY OF LIBEI~ALISM IN THE 1960s Allen J. Matusow Harper & Row, $22, 542 pp...
...What those movements really were, however, and what they revealed of the fault lines in the dominant liberal dispen- sation, went largely unexplained...
...Basil wants to get at Boston and all it represents...
...In short, many small conversions are the nucleus for larger de- velopments...
...Barring bureaucratic complications at the outset, acquisition, building and even renting time is short...
...Virtually all schools converted into housing have been rented in record time...
...I Screen STRANGE BETA-FELLOWS FAMILIARITY BREEDS--& BREEDS O NE LINE quoted from a movie critic in a newspaper advertisement sums up the cinema's summer of discon- tent: "Move over, Porky's, Revenge of the Nerds is the social misfits' Rocky.'" Now it is understandable that an ad wQuld advance no claim to profundity on behalf of Nerds, but it's not too much to suppose that moviemakers still try to be original, and curious therefore that one critic, at least, believes this movie's merit lies in its resemblance to two other films...
...a young spokesper- son for the new cause, Verena Tarrant (here played by un- known Madelaine Potter...
...Fifth, low acquisition cost and a broadening of the local tax base through new residents...
...Better the soundings of Hunter Thompson or Joan Didion, reporting candidly from within the "unraveling" which Matusow pretends to survey from a vantage point unwashed by the period's high tides...
...Conan the De- stroyer, and The Search for Spock, Star Trek Ill...
...now teenagers inherit the screen...
...One area in which communities have apparently softened their opposition to subsidized housing is to units for the el- derly, a direction in which most subsidized (Section 8) school-housing conversions has gone...
...But if Olive was to be this important, she should have been more complicated from the beginning of the film: we should have seen more internal conflict, and less obsession...
...Better Midge Decter's cut-and-slash polemics...
...FROM PEARL HARBOR TO RONALB REA- GAN Frederick F. Siegel Hill and Wang, $17.50, 289 pp...
...Burrage, a New York matron who pat- ronizes feminism in an 1870s version of ~adical chic...
...A TIME OF PASSION: AMERICA, 1960-1980 Charles R. Morris Harper & Row, $17.50, 270 pp...
...The problem is that her emo- tional center is a lugubrious paralysis of will which becomes not just unpleasant to observe but even -- despite some poten- tiai dramatic material --uninteresting...
...An amusing send-up of a decade of fantasy, the film is set in a hip, nonpastoral New York, with plenty of shots of singles' parties and upscale locations...
...The result is bathos...
...His chauvinism is muted, in short, and shorn of its cultural and geographical angle...
...What do developers like about conversion...
...By and large rehabilitation requires more expenditures for manpower than materials...
...Unsurprisingly, the novel sold poorly, its tone falling fiat with an American audience not yet used to the severe equation that James borrowed from Flaubert: two times zero equals zero...
...Seventh, they are labor intensive...
...The very writing of liberal history like Matusow's presupposes the values, character type, and ethic he tells us are gone...
...Many older schools are architec- tural landmarks, an economically significant fact since it adds a 25 percent depreciation factor for a private developer even if the property is converted into subsidized housing...
...On the evil empire that here rears its ugly head, he turns not just laser beams but his awesome weapon of age, nonchalant deadpan blarney...
...Olive clings to Verena, an ingenue whose faith-healing, mesmerist father had trained her to speak powerfully on public issues...
...But tinkering with James's nuances can be dangerous and can throw his tearful symmetries out of ,alignment...
...These roles are played respectively by Linda Hunt, Jessica Tandy, and Nancy Marchand, three professionals who know how to take a back seat when they see one...
...But its real location is a familiar ad- dress, the well mapped border between reality and Other, here with ancient Babylonian devils taking up residence on Central Park West...
...in both, after killing various adults (one notes the first to go are high school teachers), the invaders are themselves knocked off by adolescentsturned-warriors...
...Second, the buildings are generally of sound quality...
...Nature abhors a vacuum, and by default, Olive Chancellor becomes the center of the film...
...Books: UNRAVELING AMERICA'S WAY B ENEATH THE crosscurrents of learned conjecture that are the writing of academic history, the movements of the 1960s still surge like dangerous undertows...
...The movie details the emergence of the women's movement from abolitionism just after the Civil War, and centers on a peculiar emotional triangle: a Brahmin feminist, Olive Chan- cellor (here played by Vanessa Redgrave...
...little does he know he is simply trapped in typical contemporary filmmaking: hi-tech, low-mind...
...Essentially there has been a shortage of money available for any kind of low- or moderate-income housing...
...First, good location...
...Since school conversion is novel and somewhat imaginative, lenders are somewhat skit- tish...
...Such praise underlines the defect of most summer movies this year, an outrageous aping of previous successes, especially successes won with younger audiences...
...Jim Sleeper of the writers considered here, does a competent job of lracking the sixties' reg- nant liberalism by its own articulated standards, but he loses course and heads for trouble when he tries to take the measure of profoundly illiberal rebel- lions with the equipment at his com-mand: .9 Critics had attacked the hip- pies as hedonistic and narcissistic...
...Indeed, how different is RedDawn from Gremlins...
...The essentially liberal discourse of the academy seems to stutter into incoherence before, the specter of the sixties' illiberal eruptions in its midst...
...They were con-structed with good materials and in full compliance with build- ing codes...
...But Reeve is also an improved Ransom: he is no revengeful Southerner trying to snake his way toward victory, but sincere in a conventional romantic manner...
...The most interesting characters in The Bostonians, the only life in the party, are Dr...
...and a handsome Southern cousin of Miss Chancellor, Basil Ransom (here played by Christopher Reeve, trying to escape from Superman clothes...
...The scenes seem tediously repetitive, and the character of Verena --one of James's strong naifs, with powerful reserves of sincerity and simplicity --seems little more than a yo-yo...
...Much of Redgrave's performance simply consists in long shots of her sitting by a window, mournfully waiting for Verena to return...
...Another method of handling small schools which do not seem economically viable to develop by themselves is to build additional units on the same site...
...TROUBLED JOURNEY...
...The exception, Ghostbusters, proves the rule...
...In both, nasty invaders attack one of those ever unsuspecting, perfectly pastoral American towns...
...In Cloak and Dagger, Henry Thomas, formerly of E.T...
...Their deeds are not just indispensable in space or in supernatural fantasylands, or when computers or tape cartridges run amok or amiss, but also in political-military thrillers like the recent RedDawn, with its imagined invasion of Colorado by Communists from Latin America...
...Especially derivative are "hi-tech" movies such as Electric Dreams, where a com- puter falls in love with a beautiful musician (mixing elements of MTV with the mad machine motif from War Games...
...Prance, a no-nonsense woman doctor', Miss Birdseye, a Boston do-gooder who keeps her humor about her...
...What regenerative power can it offer, what searchlight into the post-Enlightenment mists...
...turned nasty) or The Karate Kid (an adolescent, albeit improved, Rocky...
...Not only are these wooden cadences ineffective...
...Basil Ransom is less interesting in the film than in the novel, a change that throws all the dramatic interest on the female characters...
...Sixth, preservation of landmarks...
...and Dabney Cole- man, formerly of War Games, perform down-to-earth heroics by preventing secret plans for a new bomber from being whisked out of the country in --you guessed it --an Atari tape cartridge...
...The neoconservatives did manage to convince most of us that the upheavals of that fateful decade weren't mere consequences of, and certainly not effective responses to, the "oppression" the rebels claimed to find all around them...
...If the roadblocks to public housing, are to be removed, unused school property put to use, new taxes evoked, and low- and moderate-income families provided housing, these vacant schools provide the resource immediately at hand...
...With these advantages why are there not more conversions...
...But Verena at least cannot sustain it: Madelaine Potter is given little to do but flutter back and forth between an increasingly resentful Olive and a persistent Basil, often re- peating the exact same lines: "Just ten minutes," she pleads to Olive at least several times, or "An hour, an hour, at most," she warns Basil as they jaunt off together...
...Such generally is the case with The Bostonians, a film version of Henry James's novel by producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala --a team that previously collaborated on such literate, picturesque films as last year's Heat and Dust and the earlier adaptation from James, The Europeans...
...Olive is an enormous self-contradiction: physically imposing and strong-minded in her education of Verena into centuries of female oppression, she never assumes any power in the outside world, and is rarely forced to confront her own self-denial...
...Hence sequels like Indiana Jones...
...This translates into less interest paid by the developer...
...Types like James Bond or Errol Flynn used to perform this kind of role...
...Perhaps the graphics of these movies can be distinguished, but their plots seem clones, or, as the robot-duplicates are termed in The Last Starfighter, beta-parmers...
...Commonweal: 506...
...The Southern angle is important to James...
...Whatever Reeve and Potter managed in the film, they were bound to be overshadowed by Redgrave, with her long years of experience in playing suffering heroines, particularly those like the neurotic Olive...
...More space and character are possible in converted school apartments than in typical new fiats for comparable costs...
...TOM O'BRIEN (Beginning with this issue, Tom O'Brien will serve as Commonweal's regular movie critic...
...Some-thing extraordinarilypainful and promis- ing animated millions of Americans, and one sometimes suspects that we as a na- tion haven't resolved the sixties' wrench- ing dilemmas as much as we've fled them...
...Vanessa Redgrave either doesn't know such restraint or wasn't directed toward it...
...The basic reason for the imitativeness is simple...
...What sense can it make, then, of the illiberal currents of the decade...
...Is it possible that she identified too closely...
...his sheer imaginative honesty, grounded in experience as a 1960s front-line adminis- trator of urban programs, lets him dissect the period's "excesses" with a wry, classical stoicism and a slightly mis- chievous moral edge that retains its op- timism within a sense of its own limits.9 Better, finally, the longer, postwar view taken by Frederick Siegel, a young histo- rian who construes the past forty years of American history as a contention among deeply rooted political mythologies thrown into conflict by an emerging cor- porate politi.cal economy...
...Part of the hold-up is a lack of financing models...
...For example, Christopher Reeve looks like an appropriate Basil Ransom, complete with his "Snidely Whiplash" seducer's mustache, and he can truly draw hisses with his sweetly voiced desire to "lock up" Verena "all to myself...
...Many schools could be converted into small-family units without conversion since most units could house a couple with one or two children at the very most, avoiding the fears of inundation...
...and Mrs...
...With the limited financing available, conventional financing has predominated because of the lack of government funds, the lack of housing authority initiative and the relative reluctance of communities to accept the rezoning prerequisite to convert schools into low-moderate subsidized housing...
...I'm going nuts, I think I'm talking to a machine," the hero of Electric Dreams laments...
Vol. 111 • September 1984 • No. 16
