Screen:
Alleva, Richard
Corots. And some is ridiculous, like the Renoir watercolor ...
...est writing talent: his knack for serving up comic-sinister Whatever Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino feel about true rodialogue which is not only funny but which registers the stir- mance in the abstract, they certainly mock it in their characrings of violence as a Geiger counter detects the presence of ters...
...No, for satire has a moral purpose...
...COME AND SEE...
...Solicitude for one's own skin will settle for from the movies is a joke...
...And you are a joke for may not be the noblest of emotions, but when Pinchot, trapped watching this movie...
...Lee Siegel, a frequent contributor to Commonweal, is a What sinks this new permanent exhibition, a neoclassical free-lance writer living in New York...
...Everything's a joke...
...He made you see their selfday present...
...What they don't know is that the mob movie's world of violence and greed, we are meant to see that is in pursuit and, later, some L.A...
...Gary Oldman astonished jello by an assassin, feels fine after Clarence dabs her face with me as a white pimp trying with considerable success to look Kleenex...
...All very noble, but note how Tarantino taints this act of heroism...
...No, for the violence is so producer...
...Satire...
...Saul Rubenick (the dime novelist of makes us laugh...
...able, just as much without real consequences...
...Why would the spirit can be a bigot too, or at least talk like a bigot in order to inof this redneck Galahad urge his fan on to homicide and drug flame his enemies...
...A brave and loving father and children but otherwise nonviolent...
...School and two parishes...
...Hopper defies his tormentors and provokes them into killing him before he breaks under torture...
...The first paintings that one comes upon sitivity to Manet's cultural stature, strangely insensitive to the are some portraits by Jacques-Louis David...
...And, get quirements by being sufficiently animalistic...
...he once famously declared, "and I'll paint one...
...Go see True Roreal by the caveat of business, law, and banking money...
...The viewer's response has been encoded in the columns and cornices, the archways and moldings: you shall be overwhelmed by the power of culture-as if institutionalized culture were not time and time again overwhelmed by Rousseau's secrets, Corot's silvery sentience, Monet's beautiful lies, Degas's hardness, Van Gogh's mad yellows, Gauguin's lustful geometry, Cezanne's post-Edenic apples, which are not meant to be seen but bitten by modern eyes impatient for appearances to fall...
...The Benedictine monks of Newark Abbey have been in the center of Newark, New Jersey, since 1854...
...Clarence and Alabama a truly interesting love scene but he is a whiz at capturing the often watch glitzy, ridiculous crime shows on TV before and profane mockery and excitement of detectives listening on head- after launching into some violent encounter of their own...
...And some is ridiculous, like the Renoir watercolor hung below a watercolor by Cezanne, a contrast that might begin a movement urging the museum to sell its Renoirs and use the money to expand the often overcrowded cafeteria...
...Fantasy violence vs...
...The David...
...And why is a later sex bout accomplished in a phone er in greed and viciousness, and they display Tarantino's great- booth while Clarence calls a pal who is sitting on the toilet...
...LEE SIEGEL curators are equally reductionist, but in the opposite direction...
...netism to elicit both laughs and chills...
...That is, when all is said and done, Of course, some curators today make the mistake of narrowly one of history's more benign developments...
...tainted by the malice Tarantino shows for both his characters Nihilistic laughter in the dark...
...Alabama, beaten nearly into the leads...
...In this Hollywood executives...
...Following a daily schedule that balances prayer and work...
...The lofty, se- But the curators have made a statement and a decision, and date room devoted entirely to portraits by Manet is, in its sen- very deliberately so...
...And he is also good at pushing the comic- ironic juxtaposition...
...Serving as a sign of hope and Good News in our city...
...But Malick managed to conduct the viewer into the dreams a bubble-headed tart sent to the lad by his employer as a birth- and aspirations of his delinquents...
...For all their undoubtedly good intentions, the Metropolitan's walls to another-live forever...
...A Unforgiven) is deliciously loathsome as a self-bedazzled movie sort of Brechtian distancing device...
...They are a signifoverturning of tradition that the creator of the scandalous Dejeu- icant choice...
...To which she can only reveal anything about their main characters that you haven't gush, "You are so-o-o romantic...
...Pinchot endows this craven would-be actor, pro- Under the squeal of brakes and the bursts of firepower, I seemed ducer's toady, and police informant with so much humor and to hear someone in the theater's darkness muttering, "It's a joke, (relative) sanity that Blitzer becomes the single truly human see...
...don't have their virtues and vices in neat separate packages but have them all messed together...
...Tarantino can't write a father-son reconciliation or And consider the treatment of violence...
...its sole aim is not to reveal character under pressure but mereFor drug dealing is indeed the mission as Clarence and his ly to shock...
...Their per- "In the Ghetto...
...sinister into sheer horror, as when an assassin admits to a victim But though the violence undergone by the lovers is considerthat he used to be sickened whenever he killed but now does it ably more graphic than what they watch, it is just as unbelievjust to see the expressions on his victims' faces change...
...Alabama is the sort of girl who thinks that having images as well as their frightful deed and so you enjoyed bione's life controlled by a pimp isn't so bad, though, come to focal vision: whenever Sheen murdered, you shuddered at the think of it, hers did spend some time recently stomping on the action but you were also gripped by the self-deluding fantasies stomach of one of the other whores in his stable...
...But in the graduprojecting contemporary issues onto older art...
...Comedy...
...ready to use his fists in defense of women WHAT ARE MONKS DOING IN THE CITY...
...The hero is opposite wall, as though it were the eve of the Battle of an Elvis-obsessed, moronic piece of white Agincourt...
...radiation...
...530 Commonweal 22 October 1993: 23 and his audience...
...thus in accom- al course of change passion became good taste...
...It's true that Clarence has a couple Arquette...
...Ministering to God's people through Saint Benedict's Prep...
...mance...
...Newark, New Jersey 07102 Phone (201) 643-4800, ext...
...later, Alabama learns that Clarence, seeking to avenge her honor In True Romance, the strategies of writer Quentin Tarantino or, more likely, assuage his own jealousy, has just murdered and director Tony Scott are the opposite of Malick's...
...cops are conducting a sting...
...SCREEN A fantastic and proprietary notion of culture as an autonomous, self-enclosed realm has been created in these galleries, as if the paintings had no meaning or force outside the SMUT IN YOUR EYE generic standards of officially cultivated sensibility that the new SCOTT'S 'TRUE ROMANCE' decor now represents...
...For Further Information Write Director of Vocations Newark Abbey 520 M.L...
...the lovers, at least, are pure in their passion...
...An phones to a drug deal...
...King Blvd...
...And isn't Presley an inappropriate fairly burdened with roles requiring intelligence and charm...
...Consequently, some of the hanging is uninspired, like the For starters, there's the fictional comTurners facing off across a large room with Delacroixs on the pany you will have to keep...
...Living in community according to the Rule of Saint Benedict...
...But best of all is Bronson No, there is some other underlying emotion at the core of Pinchot as a profoundly luckless go-between memorably named this movie, and I'll venture a guess as to what it is...
...No, not even to shock but just to give us yet aninamorata, with a suitcase loaded with cocaine taken from the other dirty little dig in the ribs...
...Titanic sporting distinguished passengers and high society polish, is the deadly iceberg of Kultur...
...Why these instantaneous recoveries...
...Some is almost vaudevillian, like the mediocre trash named Clarence Worley who, when he's not clerking in d'Aligny stuck next to a doorway between some masterful a comic-book store (where he reverently samples the product), 22: 22 October 1993 Commonweal doesn't get out of his apartment much, although he always treats formances aren't exactly good but they meet this movie's rehimself to a Kung-fu triple feature on his birthday...
...A few scenes that propelled him to his crimes...
...The curators are though anyone who can tell the difference should not worry reminding us that those revolutionary goals were eventually, about coming away with that impression-but the failing of this and undramatically, absorbed by the embourgeoisement of new space is to make great paintings seem merely great...
...the sting of reality...
...There is no feeling, as there once was in the Andre Meyer Galleries, of suddenly coming upon art in the midst of life, and of happily paying for it in the currency of new sensations, thoughts, or perceptions...
...dead pimp, drive from Detroit to L.A...
...to sell the dope to The "true romance" of the title is similarly subverted...
...After so many artistic deaths by politics, a death by culture provides a cautionary tale of excess to depict anything that could not be seen: "Show me an angel," on the opposite end of the curatorial spectrum...
...That will do the trick...
...nineteenth-century society...
...What are we doing here...
...But why is the first All these mobsters and detectives and Hollywood shysters are sex scene preceded by Clarence reading a violent comic book portrayed as just so many comic monsters equal to one anoth- to his girl...
...Therefore, concludes this well-read security guard, all you Sicilians are "part nigger...
...What bothers me about the speech is that dealing...
...I think it was Tarantino himself I was between the ranks of mafia and police, suggests that everyone hearing sniggering whenever viewers flinched, sneering whenhold their fire until he slips out since "all this is really none of ever they began to be interested in what he had helped to put my business," he expresses the only emotion in this movie un- on the screen...
...David, who staged the French Revolution, put classiearlier galleries might have made "great paintings seem minor"- cal form in the service of revolutionary goals...
...And though art panying catalogues and wall texts, one exclusively gets the artist's is long and life short, the arbiters of good taste-the people violating "gaze" instead of the nude, the forms of power be- who paid millions of dollars to have some of the world's most hind the captive forms of artistically rendered objects, and so stubbornly unclassifiable paintings moved from one set of on...
...Slater's eyebrow-arching frenzy and If these characters aren't repulsive enough for you, then be Arquette's baby doll gurgling are what you're stuck with for warned that they are played by Christian Slater and Patricia the entirety of the movie...
...The actor charges the air around him with for they aren't done with the clean exaggeration of comedy which nearly palpable menace...
...Modern art can be said to begin with several figner sur l'Herbe was trying to accomplish with his harsh pho- ures, among them Goya-not in the exhibition-Courbet, or tographic light, dislocated figures, and self-conscious irony...
...Elliot Blitzer...
...They grace the walls like debutantes at a coming-out ball...
...There are four stand-outs...
...this, his favorite chop-socky star isn't the dynamic Bruce Lee Now I'm certainly not suggesting that characters have to be or the endearing Karate clown, Jackie Chan, but the bestial Sonny subtle or likable to be compelling...
...Both of them struck me as nonentities when I first of daydream colloquies with his idol, Elvis Presley, but in these saw them (Slater in The Name of the Rose, Arquette in Ethan scenes the ghostly rock star merely urges Clarence on to do Frome), but I now see that that was only because they were un- what he would do anyway...
...They don't both her pimp and another gangster...
...RICHARD ALLEVA 24: 22 October 1993 Commonweal...
...Clarence's latest such ex- and Sissy Spacek, were even more psychotic than this current cursion rewards him with the company of Alabama Whitman, duo...
...For an example of that malice, take the scene in which gangsters led by Walken interrogate Clarence's father (Dennis Hopper) in order to learn our hero's whereabouts...
...Granted, the speech does have a certain nasty humor and Walken's bemused reactions to it are "You're right, dear-it's in very bad taste and offensive, and I'm hilarious...
...I also grant Bernard Shaw's insight that people going to switch it off in disgust very shortly...
...The quite similar protagoChiba, who tears off the gonads of his opponents and holds them nists of Terence Malick's Badlands, played by Martin Sheen up to the camera for our delectation...
...No, and sound black...
...The complicatedly layered aims-personal, philosophical, spiritual, aesthetic-toward which all these wildly different artistic identities worked have been ruled un- IN ant to feel like a fool...
...The result-until familiarity sooner or later pushes these unbearably magnificent rooms back into the margins between the paintings, where they belong-is a momentarily refreshing reminder of the old stuffiness...
...Movies are a joke, and what people presence in this cast of maniacs...
...Hopper, learning that Walken is Sicilian, taunts the elegant hoodlum with the fact that Moors raided Sicily centuries ago and impregnated the women...
...known from the start...
...Lengthily stomped The supporting players, abetted by Tony Scott's galvaniz- by the pimp, Clarence dashes through the rest of the movie withing staging, have such a field day that they easily nudge aside out so much as a stitch in his side...
...Christopher Walken, though patently miscast as a lovingly savored by the camera that we can't be distanced from Sicilian mafioso, manages once again to use his cobra mag- it a moment later by a bit of unreality...
...Here, choice as pop Mephisto to Clarence...
...Presley's persona both as as violence-loving turnipheads, they attain visibility, Slater by singer and actor was that of a good of boy, sexually potent but doing a third-rate imitation of Jack Nicholson and Arquette by also honest, tender, and even socially responsible (remember emulating the naive vivacity of Melanie Griffith...
Vol. 120 • October 1993 • No. 18
