Word: bogdanovich
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...Director Peter Bogdanovich has seen Anarene, Texas, in the cinematic terms of 1951-the langorous dissolves, the strong chiaroscuro, the dialogue that starts with bickering and ends at confessional. To be sure, from Summer of '42 to Carnal Knowledge, total recall gluts the screen. There is nothing very ingenious about replaying Hank Williams records or showing a kinescope of Strike It Rich. But Bogdanovich has gone far beyond simple souvenirs. His film miraculously recaptures life-styles and attitudes-sexual, social, political that have almost vanished from the national consciousness...
...lived in Los Angeles knows how perception is changed by spending half of one's life in a moving car. Tangible responses and strong emotions are triggered instantly by faces, signs, buildings that pass by in seconds. The montage is violently edited, aggressively recreating this warped perception. Unlike Bogdanovich's Targets, where endless L. A. street footage is accompanied by characters lamenting its over-all ugliness, Antonioni's L. A. is active in his characters' lives. The scene is lightweight taken as a judgment on urban decay. Seen as Antonioni's interpretation of landscape, it provides a clue...
...generally conceded that an audience forced to watch a movie through the eyes of its main character begins to identify with that character, a point which for my money Bogdanovich disproves. Renata Adler wrote a depressing column suggesting that the audience, looking through the sniper's gunsight, wants him to hit his victims--just as the audience wants that car to sink into the swamp in Psycho although its disappearance serves only to protect nasty old Mrs. Bates. Nuts! An audience made complicit in wholesale slaughter by virtue of POV shots resists with all its might, particularly when they have...
...retire, beautifully played by Boris Karloff. We learn early that there is going to be a confrontation of the two at a drive-in, and tend to want to get it over with once the set-up has been established. To some extent, this is suspense generated slickly by Bogdanovich, but mostly it's irritation at having to wade through tentative cross-cutting toward a climax...
...Targets has one hell of a pay-off, and adding it to the film's generally successful calculation, Bogdanovich comes out pretty clean considering this is his first movie. Midway through he begins to set up a contrast between the horror of reality represented by the sniper and the melodrama horror of movie reality represented by Orlock. At the end, Orlock takes Bobby, knocking a gun out of his hand with a cane, asserting a potency he had thought nonexistent. Although ambiguous, the effect is one of total release: we are still in a movie, and in the movies...