Word: director
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...associates. But the organization is supported entirely by public funds, including $36,000 from California and $2 million contributed in the past by the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. The man behind the founding of the cooperative was former Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker, who feuded with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and its headquarters are in California's department of justice. There L.E.I.U. keeps computerized card files on 4,000 people. For $350 in annual fees, a police department can ask for information on any of the 4,000; for an extra $300, it can get copies...
There might have been fun in Rocky II, but not with Stallone serving as writer and director. During its first half, the film offers tedious exposition that exists solely to keep the big fight at bay. The script's stalling techniques are random and far fetched. Stallone tries to create drama out of Rocky's inexplicable inability to gain steady employment, his domestic foibles and, finally, out of his wife's simultaneous bouts with childbirth and coma. These developments are so poorly conceived that Adrian's brother (a newly slim Burt Young) must dart...
Stallone uses montages more than any other director since Eisenstein; he does not seem to understand that movie cameras are now mobile. All the performances are italicized and phony, a sad descent from the original Rocky. At one point in the new film, Rocky balks when a hustler suggests the marketing of a "Rocky doll"; yet, that is exactly how Stallone has merchandised himself here. The Rocky we see in Rocky II is best suited for mounting on a dashboard...
...formed the partnership celebrated in that mighty hit of (can it be?) a decade ago, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In the circumstances it would have been sufficient merely to evoke the antic cheerfulness of the old movie and then coast home on its reputation. Instead, Director Richard Lester, a master of off-the-wall historical japery (The Three Musketeers), has chosen to make Butch and Sundance an exercise in style; he tries to find the cinematic equivalent of oral tradition and legend making, or, less fancily, yarn spinning. This means that the film's pace is leisurely...
...evidence of this movie, the 1978 Grand Prize winner at Cannes, it seems safe to say that Italian Director Ermanno Olmi is no fan of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900. Like 1900, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a lengthy (three hours), luxuriously photographed film about Italian peasants, but after that all similarities end. 1900 was a didactic epic that attempted to merge the florid drama of opera with the tenets of Marxism; Clogs is pointedly a tranquil, nonpolemical attempt to describe the peasants' daily existence in the objective manner of documentary cinema. Given their respective goals, Olmi...