Word: convictionless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...unemployed adolescent from a broken home, trying to draw a curtain of rock music between himself and the terror-ridden streets, where glibly impassioned rhetoric is punctuated by the sound of explosions. Still, there is time on his hands and an emotional need to fill, so he drifts, convictionless, into the I.R.A.'s orbit, driving getaway cars for their "revolutionary" crimes. One of these forays results in the murder of a police constable named Morton (and the unintended maiming of his father) on the farm three generations of the family share. Why the man was marked for death...
...interested enough to include different points of view among his characters. Thus the social scope of the novel is harshly limited--which is a great pity, seeing that he can work with broad canvasses. In his reflexive fear of being thought simple-minded or today. Mailer is reduced to "convictionless" scene painting, to sentimentality, and to clutching at other people's semi-coherent and mysterious goodness. Again, Norman Mailer is like a painter who can depict but not name his subject; it is no surprise that he had trouble with the title. None of this obscures the fact that...
Lacking psychological intelligence or, for that matter, awareness of Hollywood sociology, Mommie Dearest is just a collection of screechy scenes further distanced by convictionless direction. Confronted by a movie without narrative tension or human interest, one is finally reduced to watching the paint dry-on Dunaway's face...
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