Word: bakshis
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Directed by Ralph Bakshi...
...Bakshi also condemns the use of drugs without delving into the pressures which cause their use. The band plays in Kansas, and, what do you know, a kid who visits backstage turns out to be Tony's (from that first backstage tryst). Tony suffers a series of painful flashbacks that seem to assert: "Oh, why did I go across the country and take all those drugs when I could have stayed, married, and washed dishes all my life? This attitude is so antithetical to the adventuresome spirit of pop music one wonders why Bakshi even bothered...
...ROLLER COASTER of a movie barrels toward hell: the lead singer dies, and Tony deserts his kid ("Little Pete") on a NYC street. Bakshi decides to bring the story up to the present while linking it with the past, so Pete struts the street to Pat Benatar's recent "Hell is for Children" (a dismal choice for an anthem!) and stops to look in a doorway where an orthodox rabbi is chanting and moves on. Young punks denying their past! Oy vey! The screen explodes into surreal dance on the edges of razor blades, mouth-piercing safety pins...
...Pistols are as American as the Queen. To use this song as the culmination of 75 years of American pop denies any unity Bakshi once promised...
...classic point to be made about American pop music is that so many types of music emerged with so few lines in common. Bakshi seems to realize this, putting Scott and Janis Joplin, Fabian, and Lou Reed songs in the same movie. But by trying to make more connections than actually exist, he stretches the attractive canvas he has drawn into a demented and confused statement, encompassing family, war, drugs, love, and music, but saying nothing about them...