Word: celluloidal
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...olden days, after the end of World War II, there dwelt in the Bavarian Alps a countess of extreme pique and doleful countenance (Angela Lansbury). Or so the celluloid scribes of Something for Everyone inform us. Looming up in the mists was her former abode, a massive castle that would have excited the imagination of a Winston cigarette ad campaigner. The countess's present quarters were on the castle grounds in a palatial lean-to that the countess shared with her gay son and a daughter who had once been voted the Ugliest Duckling beyond the Valley...
Dramatic Vise. This is a filmed version of the play (TIME, Feb. 28, 1969), and Williamson is a man of the theater in the same way that a tiger is a creature of the jungle. This means that he transcends the celluloid and holds the audience in a dramatic vise. His eyes sear the viewer. He is not speaking to the air; he is speaking to you. As far as Williamson is concerned, elocution be damned. Poetry be damned. Meaning is all. Never has Hamlet been rendered with more clarity or more biting timeliness, and that includes Gielgud, Olivier...
...sour as The Comic. If its advertisements are to be believed, the movie is simply a fond lampoon of Hollywood's pride-and-pratfall epoch. As the film unreels, it becomes in fact a furious editorial about a business that treats its veterans like overexposed celluloid...
...quality film. Such scandalous scenes as a female-to-male rape with a leather dildoe may prove too much even for today's censors. When Author Vidal is not trumpeting the beatitudes of bi-sexualism, he is trying to convey another message: ours is a society dangerously worshipful of celluloid (there are no fewer than 95 stars mentioned in his book). Thus the film version of Myra comes full circle; it will be a movie about a book about movies...
...shows, comes not from scheming and exploitation but from the slow corruption of courage and spirit. "Fat City," as fighters sometimes call success in boxing, is bankrupt. The long sleek cars, the sweet shock of public recognition, the feel of silk on skin is, for most fighters, pure celluloid fantasy. Their daily rounds are marked instead by steady pain and a sameness that is itself the mark of most hells...