Word: childishly
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...films about sensitive, unmarried men. Woody Allen's Manhattan and Bob Fosse's forthcoming All That Jazz are both, in part, self-lacerating accounts of heroes who toy with women to satisfy selfish neurotic needs. Blake Edwards' hit "10" is a touching farce that punctures the childish sexual fantasies of a male-menopause victim. In Starting Over, Burt Reynolds turns from a newly liberated wife to an equally liberated lover; Alan Alda's The Seduction of Joe Tynan tells much the same tale from a more somber perspective...
...kitsch; The Rose is a definitive catalogue of A Star Is Born clichés. The heroine battles with booze and men and show-biz tycoons, but somehow always manages to get out onstage and give a hell of a show. She has only two temperaments, childlike vulnerability and childish tempestuousness. The howler-ridden script makes little effort to tie these bromides to a plot or flesh them out with psychological insights. We are asked to believe that Rose's problems all stem from a fateful night when she let the entire high school football team have...
...guard and then knock him flat with cynical or black-humorous lyrics. "Marathon" goes on a careless, accelerating dance through the 20th century, nostalgically stopping at favorite decades, until the abrupt, eschatological ending puts a stop to the singing, the dancing and the music. "Carousel" sets lyrics of childish innocence about carnivals, and ferris wheels, and cotton candy to light-hearted oom-pah-pah music that gradually speeds to a maniacal frenzy, until no singer could possibly keep...
...writing. She is especially effective in describing the dispossessed, social outcasts or loners whose frustrated dreams fueled the violence and anger of the '60's. In "Notes Toward a Dreampolitik," she focuses on bikers and a young girl who wants to be a movie star. The bikers' childish excesses outrage her, yet she captures their alienation and compares it with the futile dreams of an aspiring star who desperately wants to be known...
...partly the spectacle of Western decadence that aroused the Ayatullah Khomeini to orgies of Koranic proscription. Alcohol, music, dancing, mixed bathing all have been curtailed by the Iranian revolution. Americans find this zealotry sinister, but also quaint: How can almost childish pleasures (a tune on the radio, a day at the beach) deserve such puritanical hellfires? But Americans are also capable of a small chill of apprehension, a barely acknowledged thought about the prices that civilizations pay for their bad habits: If Iran has driven out its (presumably polluted) monarch and given itself over to a purification that demands even...