Word: eastman
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...AMERICAN BOY Directed and Written by CHARLES EASTMAN...
...American Boy is a funny, wily, eccentric and inventive movie about dead ends and dubious dreams, opportunities lost and responsibilities evaded. Director-Writer Charles Eastman (best known previously as the author of the screenplay for Little Fans and Big Halsey) evokes, in the character of Vic, the kind of wary protagonist whose abdication of personal responsibility made anti-heroes out of Dean and Brando, Fonda and Hopper. The film builds to a crazy, disorganized hillside ceremony in which the entire town of Buddy, Calif., comes to cheer its boy Vic off to the nationals. Vic sees...
Having adopted the Dean-Brando mold, Eastman then cracks it. He never takes advantage of his characters, never looks down on them or their poorest dreams. Yet he does make it clear that Vic's accurate reading of the situation-why should he assume the burden of anyone's ambitions but his own?-is also a dodge. His idea of freedom is a sort of emotional copout, a yearning not so much to find something as to be away from everything. In this most of all, Eastman suggests, Vic is the all-American...
...Eastman has a quirkish, distinctly personal tone that goes coy once in a while, as in a labored double-entendre exchange between Vic and a black woman (Rosalind Cash) over the installation of a car radio ("Do you want it in the front or in the back?"). But the movie is also full of humor, melancholy and some dazzling film making. This is Eastman's first film as a director, but he demonstrates considerable sophistication, a feeling for textures and odd nuances. One long scene in a gym-empty at first, then slowly filling with fighters doing exercises...
...race to introduce the first instant movie film, Eastman Kodak Co. last week took a quick step ahead of its rival, Polaroid Corp. Kodak showed off its new Supermatic 8 processor, in which 50 ft. of movie film can be developed in less than 13½ min. by an unskilled operator v. the 20 to 30 min. required by highly paid technicians using conventional equipment. The compact machine is roughly the size and shape of an office photocopying machine; only an hour is needed to learn...