Word: bachelored
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...FELLINI NEEDED anything to make him hang up his clipboard and maul out his casting book it is Neil Israel's Bachelor Party, a working man's 8 1/2 that within the framework of an allegorical pre-wedding debauchery provides a scary but ultimately redemptive examination of the bases of modern society...
Israel, in conjunction with executive producer Joe Roth, associate producer Gautam Das, producers Ron Moler and Bob Israel, and presented by Raju Shared Patel in an Aspect Ratio/Twin Continental Production, fills Bachelor Party with a potpourri of literary and classical allusions. Rick (Tom Hanks) is a soon-to-be-wedded bus driver who invokes the love-death imagery of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, the death-as voyage image of classical Greek mythoiogy, and the transportation theme of his own Police Academy. All at the same time...
...before the audience can settle in to the deceivingly simple morality play. Israel yanks out our chain, as it were. Why marriage? What is marriage but a rationalization of humanity's baser instincts? This is a realization that obviously bothers Israel, and that is why his bachelor party is fueled by an almost manic fear of the next day's ceremonies. The Renoiresque debauch operates almost as a tragic catharsis, an the participants will the demonic spirits that torment them to take flight and be gone...
...question is never truly answered, and, in with all great cinema, makes Bachelor Party strangely disquieting, for it raises more questions than it can answer. Does the final marriage scene imply that mankind is saying "I do" to his own self-destruction? Is the consummation of marriage really only an invitation an voyage to the magic mountain of moral turpitude? Or is it just having your chain yanked by the almighty...
...seems a shame, then, that Blades is going into Panama politics. He has a while yet to change his mind, which is good news for anyone who favors music with a hard edge and a hard swing. This fall Blades will move farther north, from his bachelor apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side to the cultivated wilds of Cambridge, Mass., where he will work for a master's degree in law at Harvard. "I am totally convinced that I am going to have a lot to do with the future of my country," he says...