On Screen

...Why does it keep slipping off its possessor's fingers...

...only an adult with pretensions could take such foolishness seriously...

...Why, if it is evil, can it be used for good as well...

...there is also a nauseatingly saccharine song, "Bright Eyes," sung by Art Garfunkel, whose appeal is surely limited to the prepubescent...

...More dismaying than that figure, though, is the fact that a sequel to the movie will be forthcoming...

...As Laurie, Jamie Lee Curtis (daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, the showering victim in Psycho) displays a pleasantly equine face and modest acting ability...

...But since the assortment of hobbits, ores, elves, dwarfs, and other inhabitants of Tolkien's middle-earth are more or less humanoid in appearance, the disparity between the way they look and the sounds they make is not so great that the real voices and actors intrude on our awareness...

...Indeed, the film is not even a particularly successful fairy tale...

...There is even a brief nod in the direction of Howard Hawks, who is another "pantheon" filmmaker...

...Certainly her intelligence is not responsible...

...These are provided by, among other, Ralph Richardson, Denholm Elliott, Michael Hordern, Roy Kinnear, and the late Zero Mostel, with the regrettable consequence that the personalities of the offscreen humans (especially in the case of Mostel), tend to overwhelm those of the animals...

...Who cares, anyway...

...flat figures in the foreground move in front of, rather than within, equally flat scenery...

...the dummy/ventriloquist theme was explored with much greater subtlety 30 years ago in the Michael Redgrave sequence in Dead of Sight and in a lowbudget mid-'60s British import, Devil Doll, starring Bryant Halliday...

...The cartoon characters were then apparently superimposed on their scenes, and the combination permits Bakshi large-scale effects—such as the "Helm's Deep" battle sequence, involving hundreds of warriors—that would have been nearly impossible through animation alone...

...There he meets Peggy Ann (Ann-Margret), whom he worshipped from afar in high school and has not seen for 15 years...

...one is led to believe that her sexual reticence and her homely print dress and knee socks, more than anything else, account for her salvation...

...As their talk proceeds, Bakshi varies our perspective on the scene to correspond with that of whichever of the pair is speaking...

...I'm not sure how that description translates into English, but the reference to Hitchcock has some foundation...

...In addition, The Lord of the Rings is technically superior to Watership Down...

...Worse, we never find out how he hit upon the brilliant idea of combining ventriloquism with legerdemain: In one scene, without Fats, he is bombing before a hostile audience...

...Twice she fails to take away the knife when he lets it fall...

...The same could be said for Tom Allen, Sarris' disciple and fellow Voice critic, who has praised a cheap thriller called Halloween as "a sleeper that's here to stay," while simultaneously conceding that it is a "schlock film...

...When he comes at her again, she locks herself into a closet, of all places, that he easily breaks into...

...WatershipDown is equally undistinguished...

...The romance, however, is imperfectly wedded to the psychological study of Corky's dementia...

...On the other hand, almost all the wittle wabbits resemble Bambi's pal, Thumper...

...We learn very little about Corky's early life in the Catskills or his training under a mysterious mentor named Merlin...

...Though not unusual in a live motion picture, this is a difficult and no doubt expensive procedure in an animated film...

...The play of light and shadow on the bodies of the ores contributes to their three-dimensionality, too, and adds a properly eerie touch to their appearance...

...We get little sense of depth of field...

...One never knows who is fighting whom or why...

...A magician who has earned a shot at a network TV special after rising from the depths of obscurity in the Catskills, Corky is a master of misdirection: He uses ventriloquism and a wooden dummy named Fats to distract audiences from his sleights of hand...

...But his success costs him his sanity...

...Matters are not helped by Philip Duncan and Tony Guy's animation (although the very worst sequence, the abstractly stylized opening, was apparently the work of John Hubley, who was fired from the project...

...One is forced to suspect that the silly story recounted here left him plenty of time to marvel at the camera movements, so dear to the au-teurist...

...Halloween is, simply, a high school horror film—a combination of Carrie and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre...

...Specifically, Greene is referring to the talents of his star client, Corky (Anthony Hopkins...

...The animated film adaptation, at least, is a scant 92 minutes long...

...After slabbing the killer once, she neglects to make certain that he is dead...

...After investing over two hours, I was appalled to learn that Frodo's halfwitted quest was only half completed...

...the structure and symbolism of good and evil, so essential to Grimm or Andersen, are lacking in Tolkien...

...He has escaped from the mental institution where he spent the last 15 years for murdering his teenage sister, whom he had discovered having sex with her boyfriend...

...P. J. Soles, featured in Carrie, is somewhat better as Lynda, another of the young trio...

...One rabbit proclaims that men will "never rest till they've spoiled the earth...

...Moreover, the film's basic idea is unoriginal...

...And except for their coloring, randomly ranging over various shades of grey and brown, the rabbits are chiefly differentiated by their voices...

...Once again, the voices of the cartoon characters are supplied by a largely English cast, including John Hurt and Michael Graham-Cox, who worked on Watership Down...

...She is unhappily married to a lout named Duke (Ed Lauter...

...Nevertheless, technical wizardry cannot elevate this effort from the lower depths of middle-earth...

...For instance, very early in the film there is a conversation between Frodo, the reluctant hobbit hero, and Gandalf, one of the wizards of middle-earth...

...in the next, with the dummy, he is wowing a packed house...

...Children will surely recognize all this as drivel...

...it gives The Lord of the Rings the depth of field that is so egregiously lacking in Watership Down...

...Further, as he did in Coonskin and Heavy Traffic, Bakshi mixes animation with special photographic effects...

...Cor-ky's dissociation eventually disintegrates into paranoia and finally leads to suicide...

...Just as Water-ship Down offers a watered-down liberal humanism to the kind of people who think Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a profound philosophical statement, The Lord of the Rings presents a middlebrow Norse saga without tears, a middle-earth without middle English, a ring cycle with a ring but no bothersome cycle of myths...

...The result is well worth the effort...

...Three teenage girls, whose chief activities are babysitting, gabbing on the phone and making out, are terrorized by an apparently indestructible madman...

...naturally, she soons turns to Corky, and Magic then becomes a predictable, drawn-out story about a love triangle that leads to Duke's murder...

...Not since The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has a heroine so narrowly, so often, and so improbably escaped death at the hands of a masked homicidal maniac...

...A particularly striking example of his skill is his treatment of the evil ores, played by actors photographed in a technique that resembles solarization (deliberate overexposure and underdevelopment to produce a high-contrast, highly grained print), which makes them look like animated figures...

...What value is there in having it if you can't hold on to it...

...The flashbacks—to Corky's family, high school days, and an unexplained burial—add practically nothing to our understanding of his complex psychology...

...All this trickery, though, cannot disguise the basic inanity of the enterprise...

...Director Richard Attenborough has staged the first third of the film much too elliptically...

...The personality he has created for Fats soon begins to assume an almost independent existence...

...When Corky is offered his big chance, he panics and returns to the Catskills to think things over...

...Her stupidity about survival is exceeded only by his utter incompetence at murder...

...There is an account of the creation, a mythical bunny prince named El-ahrairah, and a lot of chatter about ecology...

...I must confess that, having been overwhelmed by the prospect of reading an entire novel about anthropomorphized rabbits, I never finished Richard Adams' best seller...

...Allen even calls it "a movie of almost unrelieved chills and of violence, conjuring up that unique mix of subliminal threat and contrapuntal physicality employed by Hitchcock" (one of the directors in the auteurist "pantheon...

...c ^^uch problems are minimal in The Lord of the Rings, Ralph Bakshi's adaptation of J. R. Tolkien's cult classic...

...On Screen FILM FANTASIES by robert asahina Magic, the recent movie based on William Goldman's best-seller, Ben Greene (Burgess Meredith), a high-powered agent, gives a capsule definition of the art: "Magic is misdirection...

...Unfortunately, Magic is itself a good example of misdirection—in the other sense of the word...

...In fact, "sex kills" seems to be Halloween's message...

...But its brevity is not matched by clarity of intent: Is Watership Down a cartoon for adults or for children...

...A lot of readers, evidently...

...Of the three girls, the virginal Laurie alone survives...

...The remaining two-thirds of the movie, by contrast, are grotesquely distended...

...It is therefore puzzling how Andrew Sards could recommend it as "the most intelligent kind of filmmaking this side of inspiration...

...Something like 20 million copies of Tolkien's books have been sold...

...Like the book, the movie involves a lot of fuzzy-mind (or -tailed) philosophizing...

...The first 10 minutes are a blatant ripoff of the shower scene in Psycho, and the entire movie is studded with fancy camera angles and obtrusive tracking dolly shots...

...The direction, by someone named John Carpenter, who also wrote the script (with Debra Hill) and the music, is pedestrian when it isn't merely the attempt of a film-school graduate eager to impress au-teurist critics...

...The mysterious ring that is the center of attention, for example, is never adequately explained...