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...And when they do make the best of it, the results are more immediately vivid than all the best works of the fictionists...

...And a Procol Harum number played on a church organ between Masses...

...But the equivalent scenes in the Parker movie, when the Commitments play for free in church halls and youth clubs, are even more poignant because they have a tinge of desperation...

...The lightweight, mobile camera, our surrogate eye, captures something that was not created for the camera but that the camera makes ours forever...

...GEORGE W. GRAYSON George W. Grayson is professor of government at the College of William and Mary...

...That one juxtaposition speaks volumes about the coexistence of past centuries within this century of Irish life...

...There are allusions to familiar films of the period--Casablanca, for instance--but the show is more generic than specific...

...The laughter and taunts aren't divisible from the joy: they have discovered something that is theirs and they will do with it what they will...

...The very destiny of the band is touched by the Bathetic Sublime: the kids live up to their Big Break by giving their best performance for an audience that is supposed to include the American soul singer Wilson Pickett...

...The performers--in the club, not the show--are a multinational gathering of drifters and losers like those who regularly turned up in South Sea movies of the 1930s and 1940s...

...Finally, Salinas will doubtless use his power in the choice of his successor to pick a leader who knows that the state must build bridges to "the other Mexico" where people eke out a living at the base of a squat social pyramid...

...It leads to musicians quitting, rehearsals being disrupted, performances getting unhinged, and, ultimately, the dissolution of the group...

...SCREEN IRISH SOUL 'THE COMMITMENTS' he unique value of documentary is in its rawness...

...Previous grassroots development schemes have indeed disappeared once their presidential advocates returned to private life...

...The cast (mostly musicians who can act mixed with a few actors who can play) is clearly possessed by the music...

...They applaud the Commitments with fierce joy but they laugh at their mistakes, too, and taunt them...

...But Parker then insouciantly cuts away to another scene before Jimmy can get the name out...

...So disgusted that he finally disowns his own troupe, Jimmy turns to a fellow entrepreneur and asks, "Is everyone in rock 'n' roll an asshole...

...By way of contrast, the PRI's approval rating was only 49.1 percent...

...Finally, the muck of life can clog the wheels of art...

...We seem to see the kids at the very moment of their discovery of their new powers...

...For instance, when Jimmy, the group's manager-promoter, says he's come up with the name of the band, the musicians obligingly quiet down for the big announcement...

...It is put together by a platoon of creators, three of whom (Erik Frandsen, Robert Hipkens, and Michael Garin) are playing in it, in both senses of the verb--acting and performing on musical instruments...

...In the election, however, the party benefited from its ties to Salinas and Solidarity, garnering 61.4 percent of the vote as compared with 17.7 percent for the center-right National Action Party (PAN) and 8.3 percent for the leftist-populist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD...

...This film conveys what a A Hard Day's Night did and Robert Altman's 614: Commonweal Nashville didn't: a sense of what the music means to its audience...

...Many scenes are artfully shaped so as to achieve a comic effect that I would call the Bathetic Sublime...

...The radiance on the face of the rescued child's mother, the panic in the eyes of the politician caught in a lie, the gesture of disgust from a convict denied parole, are pieces of life on their way to oblivion but for the intervention of the Arriflex or the Steadicam...

...The performance scores--but Wilson Pickett doesn't show...

...The plot is a farrago of missing jewels, corrupt colonial police, and a singer who can remember nothing 25 October 1991:615...

...Other detractors excoriate Solidarity as "opportunistic," "populistic," and a PRI "electoral gimmick" that will vanish like the Aztecs when Salinas leaves office in December 1994...

...and of the revuemelodrama that takes place there...

...When we look at these Irish audiences--a woman with a face bloated by poor nutrition and reddened by drink, a little boy so excited by the music that he has to crawl over the amplification equipment--we feel that no matter how much TV they have access to, nothing could awaken these people but a live performance played only for them...

...they will lobby hard to preserve an initiative that is bringing drinking water, electricity, schools, hospitals, and other services to depressed areas...

...of a nightclub, circa 1941, which is the setting of the show...

...His latest book is Prospects for Mexican Democracy, published last year by Transaction...

...The fictionists strive for wisdom and magic...

...It is a completely fictional, thoroughly staged movie about a bunch of Dublin working-class (but out of work) kids who get together to play American soul music...

...Luis H. Alvarez, president of PAN, applauds "the inspiration of the program," but decries PRONASOL as a power grab from Mexico City that weakens the clout of locally elected officials...

...Among direct beneficiaries, thousands of local Solidarity committees, made up mostly of women, have sprung up like mushrooms...

...He has vitalized his familiar story with the texture of documentary...

...Now The Commitments is anything but a documentary...

...This is a much more important fact than whether you or I enjoy the sound of soul because what we are mainly responding to isn't the music itself but the expressions on the faces of the players as the music finally takes hold of them, and the swaying and shaking of their bodies as the music flows through them...

...We laughed at them but our laughter was tender...

...By the time we get back to the boys, the announcement has already been made and the musicians are looking at each other dumbfounded...

...In the Richard Lester movie, the Beatles brought a new feeling of freedom and sexual lyricism to middle-class British girls who wailed and wept with delight...

...While fictional moviemakers, like novelists and playwrights, pillage life for whatever their art can use, then break and twist and reshape life's raw materials to serve the central ideas of their movies, documentarians are beggars: they wait at the back door of life, take what they get, and make the best of it...

...His overall plot may be predictable but individual scenes seem to be heading just where life wants to take them...

...A poll published in July by the highly respected Este Pals magazine found that both Solidarity and Salinas enjoyed a 62 percent approval rating among Mexicans, with fewer than 17 percent registering negative views of either...

...What does that mean...

...This comic method, which reached its peak in certain Italian comedies of the fifties and sixties li~ke Big Deal on Madonna Street, consists of setting up big dramatic moments and then instantly deflating them...

...Dublin itself quickens the movie...

...Foremost among the vitalizing elements is the music itself...

...A scene like the one in which the company's most attractive back-up singer abandons the group for a family vacation only to repent and return just in time for the Big Break belongs in a Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movie of the 1930s...

...First, the program enjoys robust support in the business sector, because it is financed with real money rather than pesos churned out by a smoking printing press...

...But that is not the only discovery through music...

...Smaller parties shared the remaining fraction of votes...

...The volatility isn't confined to the concert scenes...

...Judging by all we've seen in the movie, the answer might well be this: Yes, Jimmy, some arts are fueled by hostility and, though the hostility can be channeled into art, art can't always confine and control the hostility...

...But if Solidarity continues to flourish while retaining its stress on bootstrap activism, such infrequently heard terms as justicia, oportunidad, and esperanza (hope) may reappear in the vocabulary of impoverished Mexicans, who traditionally have regarded the government with a mixture of distrust, disdain, and dread...

...In fact, the march of events in the story--the inspiration to form the band, auditions, ragged rehearsals, company strife, discouraging debut, revitalized rehearsals, pressures from local gangsters, successful performances and, finally, the Big Break--is formulaic to the point of corniness...

...I can't imagine the lively Jimmy sitting still for an answer like that, but it's one way to express a problem that engaged Thomas Mann for 510 turbid pages of his novel, Doctor Faustus, and that has here been breezily dramatized in a movie that is as clear and impudent as a shout in the street...

...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE GETTING INTO THE ACT 'SINGAPORE' & 'ROT IN HELL' he obvious popularity of both Song of Singapore and Penn & Teller Rot in Hell makes one wonder whether or not there are two off-Broadway audiences--one for nostalgic camp and one for aggression comedy--or whether there is just one that wants to get into the act...

...So does the photograph of Elvis placed just above one of Pope John on a knick-knack table in a working-class living room...

...It didn't hurt the party's standing that Salinas brought Pope John Paul II to Chalco in May 1990 to offer Mass and bless Solidarity...

...But director Alan Parker has pulled off a neat trick...

...The Commitments...

...The real point of The Commitments is found in the rowdy behavior of the young people which grows out of the hectic street life that surrounds them...

...Song of Singapore is the name of an expensively redecorated space on Irving Place...

...Not all of this movie's vibrancy comes from verisimilitude and not all of the filmmaking smacks of documentary...

...It remains to be seen whether the next president, like Salinas, will encourage truly decentralized decision making in a political system known for top-down, authoritarian control...

...And the shellacking that the leftist opposition, the PRD, took in this year's balloting reduces the government's incentive to propitiate voters in villages and shantytowns where the PRD ran strongly three years ago...

...But this same rowdiness is destructive...

...There's no chance of these people falling into the aisles as the Beatle worshipers did, but at times they seem capable of storming the stage and eating the performers...

...It has to be acknowledged that what has been accomplished thus far, however heartening, constitutes a bare beginning toward the achievement of a measure of social justice in Mexico...

...And a little boy leading his horse into a building's elevator because the fired beast can't mount the stairs...

...I speak of documentaries that take life on the wing, not extended photo-opportunities like Madonna's Truth orDare or documentary-meditations like Marcel Ophuls's great films...

...The documentarians give us vitality...

...The very first shot of the film shows us an outdoor market in which horses are tethered next to tables stacked with TV sets...

...But there are factors that give Solidarity a 50-50 chance of surviving beyond Salinas's term, provided it avoids the double whammy of hyper-corruption and overpoliticization...

...His story is cooked, even overcooked, but the life that flows around and through it is raw...

...This rowdiness (quarrels, sexual horseplay, drinking, gluttony, out and out violence) is channeled into the music as the kids evolve their own brand of soul music...