Word: deafness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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VOICES, LUCKILY, comes nowhere close to realizing its potential. Any movie about an up-and-coming rock singer falling in love with a beautiful deaf dancer has an odds-on chance of turning into a gooey combination of Rocky, Saturday Night Fever and The Helen Keller Story. Voices, somehow, doesn't and we should be grateful...
Still and all, there are some good things about this movie. One of them is pretty Amy Irving who plays the deaf woman. She falls for Michael Ontkean, a laundry truck driver and strip joint singer. Before she knows it, she has dumped her deaf boyfriend Scott and started spending nights at the Hoboken, N.J. apartment her new boyfriend shares with his extended family of stereotypes--1) hopeless professional gambler father, 2) gang member brother, and 3) kindly, white-haired, tailor grandfather. This crew goes about their stock business as usual (Pa loses $2700 on Sleepwalker in the seventh, brother...
...sets into the U.S. For nearly ten years, they have insisted that these imports, which last year totaled 2.8 million sets and captured 40% of the market, have been illegally "dumped," sold at cheap prices way below those charged in Japan. But the last three Administrations have been strangely deaf to the industry's plaints. Investigations into the charges have been halted, and dumping duties that should have been collected have not been. Now, at the prodding of Congress, the Carter Administration's attitude is changing. Meanwhile, evidence is emerging of lax enforcement of the trade rules...
...stool at center stage, is Serge, a young man about 25 years old who has just returned to Canada from a three-month vacation to Europe. Around him, in their solitary chairs, are his four older sisters, two intolerable, hypochondriac aunts and his father who is so deaf he can barely hear shouts. During the play, Serge confronts the fact that the members of his family have made wrecks of their lives...
Carlos Dobal as Gabriel has perhaps the hardest part of all: a sixty-odd-year-old deaf man. Apparently Dobal and director Jeffrey Harper decided that Dobal should speak with the voice of a normal man rather than one who was old and deaf. Perhaps the fact that Gabrial has so many speeches--which could possibly be read as internal monologues--led them to this. At any rate, Dobal comes across as exactly what he is--a 20-year-old actor with silver paint in his hair. He doesn't convey enough of the decrepitude or pathos inherent in Gabriel...