Word: cultist
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...showed a rough looking character with a pugnacious glare, decorating a dingy sidewalk with a middle aged version of the James Dean slouch. He was the perfect role model for misfits who used suspicion of general culture to alibi for their own lack of discipline. In Confessions of a Cultist in 1970. Sarris admitted that he had inadvertently modeled a career out of escapism. And while he moved he attracted hordes willing to follow him to the paradisial loges of the Paramount...
...watch the Kinks in concert and appreciate them on a purely performing level. Your cursory familiarity with the hand won't save you here. Davies demands an appreciation that goes back to "All Day and All of the Night" a steady attention to development. Which makes Kinks fans quieter cultists than the fanatics who follow the Grateful Dead, but cultists nonetheless I didn't come into the Kinks until "Lola," and I'm no cultist but I grant myself a healthy appreciation of Ray Davies genius...
...first four episodes, hero Scott takes girl-friend Emily to see Citizen Kane. discusses the film with her and his love-life with friends B. N. C. and Harvard culture-cultist Steve, takes his suit to the dry cleaners in preparation for a date at the Museum of Fine Arts with Emily, and meets authoritarian proprietor Kane and dissatisfied employee Manny Washington I, who takes Steve's suit to wear for an employment interview and who gets the job as a part of an exhibit at the Museum, but who loses the suit to playwright Francine and actor Bradford...
Among the "classics" canonized in Confessions of a Cultist are Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, Hitchcock's The Birds, Preminger's Advise and Consent. All are auteur genre items; Sarris rarely has the flexibility of such British auteurists as Raymond Durgnat to admit that non-auteurs can produce great films. Each has raw narrative material of questionable significance, and a blatant commercial bent which made the few respectable critics feel rotten and cheated the morning after, unless trash was all they expected...
...merely following the fashionable (though his recent 2001 recantation was curious indeed). With such developments as his labeling of Fellini as the "Busby Berkeley of metaphysics," and a latent inclination towards admirable historical research and social criticism, he seems to be mellowing into adult responsibilities. However, Confessions of a Cultist, containing reviews written between 1955 and 1969, displays the attitudes of the man as he has come to be known and cherished by thousands of neglected children and child-like film buffs. He does not afford nondisciples much pleasure; for them, reading his book is simply a sobering experience...