Word: cliffs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Seeing is also a subject that Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) takes seriously. A documentary filmmaker, he is driven not by God but by the demands of an unyielding conscience to make his camera -- his eye -- bear witness to the inequities of his careless time...
...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...
...heroine is a passionate, headstrong beauty from the South who struggles to save the family estate and falls for a dashing stranger . . . A Cliff's Notes summary of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind? Not quite. It is the plot of La Bicyclette Bleue (The Blue Bicycle), a 400-page 1981 best seller by French novelist Regine Deforges. This week Deforges and her publishing company, which she now owns, are fighting to save their own fortunes in Paris, where they are defendants in a plagiarism suit brought by Mitchell's heirs...
...Claim: "The Council sponsored two well-attended concerts by Jimmy Cliff and Suzanne Vega. Harvard now has an excellent reputation in the entertainment industry, if it should wish to have more concerts in the future...