Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...What an absurd idea-a guardian to need a guardian!-Plato's Republic...
...ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR
Phase IV is good, eerie entertainment, with interludes of such haunted visual intensity that it becomes, at its best, a nightmare incarnate. It can also sometimes go quite wobbly, with ripely absurd dialogue and the most primitive sort of human characterizations. The movie is about ants, and it is clear that everyone involved was a lot more taken with them than with the Tinkertoy people provided by the script...
...movie works toward a vision of a chillingly absurd apocalypse, then pulls back a little, not in implication but in illustration. Originally, Phase IV ended with a montage of hallucinatory images suggesting man's destiny after the ants have had their way. But the sequence was deleted by Bass because he thought it too abstract. It may be just as well: the movie is not substantial enough to support the kind of philosophical freight such a montage would imply. Phase IV works best as a weird thriller and as a showcase for Bass's talents, which transform...
...attempts to analyze American society, he inevitably stumbles. In his criticism of American vulgarity--which he seems to find epitomized in the phenomenon of ubiquitous pink bubble gum--he succumbs to snobbish cultural comparisons not unlike those indulged in by early twentieth century American Anglophiles. Such generalizing is absurd in a huge and diversified society...