Word: closers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...girl. Somehow, miraculously, the narrator is able to see through the walls of her apartment to Emily's past, where she watches her pre-holocaust infancy and childhood: the insensitive mother, the kindly but officious father. Emily's childhood was one of roles, of commands and prohibitions, far closer to our time than to the world of the novel. The morality of our age seems senseless in contrast to the narrator's present: Emily's mother's "don't touch," her anger at the "dirty little girl" seems ridiculous when juxtaposed against a world where four-year-olds live underground...
...ALLEN'S comic accomplice, Diane Keaton is a lot closer to earning her cinematic stripes than Peter Bogdanovich's sidekick. Cybill Shepherd, but Keaton's performance also suffers because she's fashioned in her director's image. When she turns obsessively to the camera to suggest, "May be we could have a family. Maybe not our own; we could rent one," you'd swear she could be Allen with a wig and a nose job. But she lacks the timing of a really good comedian. When she's warned on her first husband's deathbed to remember that "Life goes...
...Even closer to him is, of all things, the Watford Football Club, which he and his father used to watch in the old days. Elton is now a director of the club, called the Hornets. They are mediocre at best, but Elton lives and dies with their fortunes. He practices with the club, he bawls out its members in the newspaper when they do especially poorly, gives them the royal box at his concerts to encourage them. He has staged benefit concerts for Watford in order to buy the team the new players it needs. A year ago, he gained...
...from several developed countries acknowledged, the gap between rich and poor nations must be bridged if equality between women and men is to mean more than shared misery. The U.S., which had earlier resisted the proposal that an economic revolution must precede the struggle for sexual equality, gradually moved closer to the Third World view...
...evidently, the price one pays for an Allen comedy. It is worth the fee. For unlike his closest cinematic competitor, Mel Brooks, Allen aims his custard pies up, not down. If his humor is merciless, it is not unkind; Boris' angry monologues with God are closer to Fiddler on the Roof than to comic on the make. The same affection courses through his parodies of Fellini and Bergman and of Pierre at Borodino. In mocking classics, in touching on the topics of religion and mortality, Allen has drawn laughter where there was silence and mustaches where there were faces...