Word: billiard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That is the way things go in Choose Me. Writer-Director Alan Rudolph has structured his movie like a daring billiard shot, which culminates with all his eight balls landing in the right pockets. He shares the paranoiac's / conviction that the world is full of strange and secret connections, but he has bathed his movie in the glowing light of his discovery that these linkages are often benign. And his actors have caught his charmed spirit admirably...
...people, both wealthy and impoverished, who live in isolation from the world at large. There Are No Thieves in This Town (1962) traces the troubles of Damaso, a poor young man with a pregnant wife, who robs the local pool hall and comes away with nothing but three billiard balls. It is bad enough that he cannot sell them; worse, the social life of the town begins to atrophy, since it may take months for new balls to arrive...
...like a virus he is unable or unwilling to shake; at the first performance of The Magic Flute he faints dead away at the piano. Portrait of the artist as a great man: while his wife and father bicker over money in the next room, Mozart slumps over a billiard table, takes a swig of wine and fleshes out Ah tutti contenti from The Marriage of Figaro, creating music of domestic ecstasy out of the discord of his family life...
...further nettled by his son's marriage to the daughter of a financier, whose occupation Sir Arthur views as "almost as low as being in trade." The old man also rails at the spread of public education and the rumor that some London clubs are using billiard balls composed not exclusively of ivory...
...core of every magic trick is a lie. When the silk has changed its color, when the chosen card has appeared, when the billiard balls have multiplied, rest assured that some lie has been told. The silk, the card, the balls--they do not tell the lie. The lie is not in the performance, but in the observation...