Word: blimps
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Manhattan's impoverished Hell's Kitchen: a lame World War II vet (Armand Assante), a loudmouthed schemer (Stallone) and a dumb but sweet aspiring wrestler (Lee Canalito). As Alice Kramden of TV's The Honeymooners might put it, what we have here are a gimp, a blimp and a simp...
...cast is large and talented. Thomas Hulce (the class "wimp"), Stephen Furst (the class "blimp"), James Daughton (a BMOC of ambiguous sexuality) and Karen Allen (as the sexiest of the animals' girls) are much more subtle performers than the material demands. Donald Sutherland, playing Faber's obligatory pot-smoking English prof, and Verna Bloom, as the dean's alcoholic wife, score some wicked points against the postgraduate generation...
...editorial quirkiness digs up much of value that would otherwise have stayed buried. But there is madness in his method. He is happiest being outrageous, and the best way to do that in his native England is to mock liberal pieties. Amis' convincing impersonation of a Colonel Blimp drifting rightward obliges him to include several mediocre poetic slaps at the left that simply do not meet his own standards. He gives space to a few Americans, including Bret Harte, Robert Frost, Peter de Vries and the late Phyllis McGinley. But he omits John Updike, who, when he chooses...
...plot revolves around a terrorist scheme by the Palestinian Black September group (Munich Olympics, 1972) to murder a stadium full of football fans at the Super Bowl, 1978, by simultaneously shooting 80,000 steel darts into the bleachers from the underbelly of the Goodyear blimp. The political motives of the principals involved, although necessarily handled mostly as a premise for suspense, are carefully presented so no-one can take credit as a sympathetic protagonist. Bruce Dern, as an ex-POW who was court-marshalled for making a film commending the North Vietnamese cause during his capture and has gotten nothing...
...there are the packed stands, the crunchy action of the game itself, the President in his box, the security people aware that something bad is supposed to happen but not sure what form it will take. In the sky there is nutsy Bruce Dern at the controls of the blimp. He has rigged it with 100,000 steel darts, which, if detonated at just the right moment, can wipe out everybody in the stadium, down to the last pompon girl. With him is Marthe Keller, his mistress and representative of Black September, the Arab terrorist organization that is financing...