Word: cleaver
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...recurrent dramatic problem in Zabriskie Point prevents it from working harmoniously for long stretches: good ideas are played to excess and then taken to the point of self-parody. The opening off-campus meeting between Kathleen Cleaver and Black militants with potential white revolutionaries starts out well with acceptable archetypal ideology tossed around. The dialogue is more theoretical than these discussions usually get (radical meetings tend to bog down in debates on procedure, elections, factional conflicts), but Antonioni cannot be blamed for telescoping exposition to raise some basic questions; it's the sort of things movies do best...
...caricatured life-styles pounds out the message too heavily to be maximally effective. The police sergeants are pig's pigs, the passing midwestern tourist hops out of his souvenir-decalled camper with his fat, snorting wife and a brownie box camera, and no less fiery a militant than Kathleen Cleaver chairs the student meeting. And after enough contrasts of clips of gorgeous desert scenes interspersed with unbelievably Orwellian visions of the supercorporation (they used tanned mannequins, plastic-grass golf courses, and rubber food in their real estate ads), the viewer is fairly certain that there are poles in American society...
...series of episodes unified by three basic threads. The first is, of course, the Rolling Stones slowly working out the song from which the movie takes its name. At the same time a group of blacks are in a London junk-yard, reading from Le Roi Jones and Eldridge Cleaver while they periodically machine-gun obsequious white women wearing virginal white gowns. The third thread is a hilarious pornographic narrative spoken throughout the movie in clipped, unemotional tones...
Many Swedes welcomed Holland's appointment, although the newspaper Expressen remarked cattily that every time a Swedish journalist asked the State Department for comment, its spokesman cracked, "Sorry, we really couldn't send you Eldridge Cleaver...
...going to bring in the story and the hell with everybody else.' " Wallace works harder and longer than anyone else. He is on the road fully one-third of his working life, and spent the New Year's weekend, for instance, tracking down the fugitive Cleaver in Algeria. Preparing for an interview with Judge Clement Haynsworth last month, he immersed himself for eight hours in Senate hearings transcripts, court decisions and CBS morgue clips. Wallace usually opens his interviews with the soft questions. "You want to put a man at ease," he says. "You waste a few, like...