Word: benatar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...Mark Reichert, 32, has been called the first punk-rock film noir. At first glance, the phrase fits. Deborah Harry, making her dramatic-film debut, is the blond of Blondie; Chris Stein, who composed the sepulchrally melodious score, is Blondie's lead guitarist; Pat Benatar, in a featured role, has an album of her own. And Union City is faithful to the tones and undertones of film noir, that postwar style of moviemaking that transposed Raymond Chandler's mean-streets prose and James M. Cain's haunted losers to celluloid. Electric blue and neon orange infiltrate...
...album first time out this summer, are said to be breaking out in a big way. That message is clear, not just because of the size of their success but because they are all guys. Say that four women, Ellen Shipley, Carolyne Mas, Ellen Foley and Pat Benatar, are breaking out with their separate debut albums, and it just sounds as if they have bad complexions...
...woman," Shipley says, "it's vulnerability or strength. People want to push you one way or another." These four are not averse to a little push. All of them take great, if sometimes contrary, care with their album photos (Benatar's picture makes her look like a black widow Piaf) and, in hallowed Hollywood tradition, Shipley and Foley decline to give their ages. Still, these women give some indication that if they do not find a fresh new direction, they may at least open up a different route...
...Benatar, 27, was born, like Shipley, in Brooklyn, and there is a lot of New York in their voices and their wise, wily, wounded attitudes. But if Shipley evokes various girl groups, Benatar sounds like all of them packed tight into one. She can put a lot of sass into a song like I Need a Lover ("Who won't drive me crazy"). Benatar's teen-age studies as a coloratura soprano have taught her, she says, "a lot of technique and stamina - I can scream without hurting myself...