Word: als
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Fish gotta swim, Birdy gotta fly, and his best friend Al gotta love this weirdo--if not till he die, then at least until he is lured out of the catatonic state in which Alan Parker's delirious and challenging movie discovers...
...immediate cause of Birdy's sorry condition, in a prison-like veterans hospital, was his traumatizing experience in Viet Nam, which was not gentle on Al either. But Al's wounds are merely physical, and his plastic surgery seems to be healing nicely. Birdy's case is altogether more desperate, and the main business of the film is to explore its roots. A sociologist might point to the usual downers: poverty, loneliness and lovelessness. But that would reckon without Birdy's mysterious singularity, expressed in his obsession with the avian world...
...attempt to fly. And we are talking about a madness that is innocent, joyous and, finally, perhaps unconquerable and exemplary. Especially as it is presented by Matthew Modine in a brave performance--just over the top but under control--with Nicolas Cage playing sane and sensible counterpoint as Al. In movies ! like Midnight Express and Fame, Director Parker oversentimentalized innocence and oversensationalized the cruelty of the world that oppresses it. Not so in Birdy. Working from a lively adaptation of William Wharton's admired 1978 novel, he has achieved his personal best. He has turned an ordinarily bleak Philadelphia location...
...contrast to the hoopla over NASA's manned missions, the Pentagon has al ways tried to keep secret the launching of its unmanned rockets carrying military satellites. In fact, not until 1978 did the U.S. admit that it flew any spy satellites over the U.S.S.R., even though their existence had been widely known for well over a decade. The Soviet news agency TASS usually announces missions just after they have been completed - successfully. Last week, the Soviets launched an unmanned model of their own space shuttle, a small, reusable winged space plane that orbited the earth once and splashed...
...right, Beckett et al would be well advised to note that even if the playwright's name is still be revered among the true believers, his work is not so timeless that it could not benefit from a quick boost by those who'd like to see Samuel Beckett become more than a Cold War artifact...