Word: bender
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...People can buy apartments," says Pamela A. Bender of the Committee to Defeat Proposition 1-2-3. "They just can't buy rent-controlled apartments...
...Bender and her cohorts say that approving Proposition 1-2-3 would not even help tenants purchase their apartments. Proponents of the referendum argue that the apartments would be sold perhaps as much as 50 percent below the market price because each apartment would have only one possible buyer. But a study sponsored this summer by those opposed to Proposition 1-2-3 concluded that significant discounts are unrealistic...
...didn't know whether he was a graduatestudent or a professor or what for a really longtime," said classmate Michael A. Bender...
...Bender's offspring are in their ways almost as unhelpful as these strangers. Her daughter Valerie (Heather Tobias, in the movie's only overwrought, misjudged performance) can buy everything but common sense and fills life's emptiness with a riot of ugly possessions. Her son Cyril (Philip Davis) has gone the opposite route. He is a leftover leftist who cannot abandon the habit of Marxist analysis but is unable to believe any longer in its power to effect change...
...light of all these lives is Cyril's live-in girlfriend Shirley (Ruth Sheen), buck-toothed and, in her self-effacing way, greathearted. Quietly, she has turned their dark, cramped flat into a haven for waifs and strays (including, finally, Mrs. Bender). Quietly too she tends her struggling rooftop garden and keeps trying to talk Cyril into having a child. What can you do these days but make a warm place to nurture people -- and some small hopes for a less harum-scarum future? Perhaps pause to admire a brave and subtle film that knowingly explores ideas, even ideologies...