Word: cliff
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...recent years, the council has been plaguedby difficulties in sponsoring successful concerts.After backing out of a deal with Chuck Berryseveral years ago, the council last fall sponsoreda concert by reggae star Jimmy Cliff, which lostit several thousand dollars...
...resort and university town of Santa Cruz, 75 miles south of San Francisco, Heidi Nyburg was enjoying the ocean view as she strolled along West Cliff Drive. When she approached the Dream Inn, where she works as a desk clerk, her serenity vanished. "Cars were bumping up and down. People were falling off their bikes, running everywhere, getting out of their cars. Women were screaming. It was panic." Blocks away, turn-of-the-century houses swayed and crumpled. The entire downtown area, including the Pacific Garden Mall, was devastated. Three people were crushed to death. Outside Santa Cruz, the community...
...Cliff's only connection to Judah -- until the concluding sequence of this thematically unified but somewhat bifurcated movie -- is through Ben, another rabbi (Sam Waterston), who is one of Cliff's brothers-in-law. The rabbi is Judah's patient, and his eye trouble is quite literal; by the end of the movie he has gone blind. But this blindness is also symbolic. By visiting this affliction on the only character in his movie who has remained close to God, Allen is suggesting that if the Deity himself is not dead, then he must be suffering from severely impaired vision...
Downstairs, on the funny line, is Cliff's other brother-in-law Lester, a sleek TV producer (played by Alan Alda in a gloriously fashioned comic performance). He offers Cliff a sinecure: filming a documentary that will make Lester look like a philosopher-king among the pompous nitwits who produce prime-time TV. Cliff agrees, but because he tries to turn Lester's story into a truthful expose, the project collapses. Along the way he loses the woman he loves (Mia Farrow), as well as a serious film to which he had been profoundly committed...
This is the funny stuff? Yes, because Allen puts a deliberately farcical spin on Cliff's frenzies. It is good showmanship, a way of relieving the itchy ironies of Judah's discomfiting story. It also rings with irony. If neither Judah's guilty musings on his own crimes -- and he does exhibit a strong desire to be caught and punished -- nor decent Cliff's frantic quest for some kind of fulfillment can awaken heaven's sleeping eye, then what in this world can? If Manhattan, coming at the end of the '70s, was Woody Allen's comment on that decade...