Word: barroomful
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...movie's biggest problem aside from a weak screen play is the conflict between its message and its means. Chicken wire over the windows tells us that barroom brawls are a common problem, but Tamahori confuses the issue by alternating uplifting fights of just vengeance with drunken displays of uncontrolled power...
Nobody got murdered that night. The guys in Hootie would rather get into an extended jam than a barroom brawl. And the band's burgeoning success seems to indicate that it's got far more fans than redneck detractors. The quartet's absorbing debut album, Cracked Rear View, has become an unexpected commercial smash, selling more than a million copies. Hold My Hand, a catchy sing-along number from the album, is in Billboard's Top 10. The music-video channel VH-1-once seen as a kind of easy-listening, out-of-touch uncle of MTV-recently changed...
Neither has Linklater. His Slacker and Dazed and Confused had huge casts, rambling narratives and a notion of film as a grab bag of blasa attitude and barroom philosophizing. It's all very '90s. Before Sunrise, on the other hand, seems instantly dated. This two-character talkfest, a kind of Eric Rohmer meets Harry meets Sally, wins points for daring to be a love story-how defiantly unhip is that?-and is presumably meant as sensitivity training for 20-year-olds. But in reaching for winsome charm, the film falls flat. This meeting of bright minds often plays like desperate...
...mail and other tech talk may be the third, fourth or nth wave of the future, but old-fashioned radio is true hyperdemocracy. Very hyper. Like the backyard savants, barroom agitators and soapbox spellbinders of an earlier era, Limbaugh & Co. bring intimacy and urgency to an impersonal age. "If we still gathered at town meetings, if our churches were still community centers," says Marvin Kalb, former CBS reporter who is teaching at George Washington University, "we wouldn't need talk radio. People feel increasingly disconnected, and talk radio gives them a sense of connection...
Similarly, director John Dahl is after something more than a nostalgic evocation of the old film noir style. He can light a mean street, a smoky barroom or a morning-after bedroom in the best tradition of the genre. But these venues are no longer situated in a big city. Dahl's Red Rock West, released earlier this year, was set in a dour little Western town. Seduction mostly takes place in a small, upstate New York town. What Dahl is saying is that you can perhaps avoid becoming a crime statistic by living in the boondocks, but that evil...