Word: films
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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JANIS JOPLIN would have detested The Rose. Starring Bette Midler, this thinly-disguised biography chronicles the epic self-destruction of Rose, a white woman from the south, singin' the blues. Director Mark Rydell clearly knows how to hack at the heartstrings; the very first shot of the film identifies Rose, i.e. Janis "pearl" Joplin, with the other self-destructive heroes of our culture, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. As the biography of a real woman, The Rose reveals nothing. It takes a marvelously idiosyncratic human being and reduces her to a cliche...
...that level however, the film works. Forget the idea that this film has any connection with Janis Joplin, the woman, and enjoy its insights into the cosmos of a "star." The Rose works splendidly when it treats Rose as a singing phenomenon transcending human limits and fails abysmally when it portrays her as a lonely woman with all of Joplin's reputed problems. As a star on stage, Midler becomes a voice and a presence. In the striking concert scenes, she projects an astounding vitality and animal-like ferocity, savaging both herself and the audience. Her voice lacks the razor...
Apocalypse Now started me really thinking about these ideas. The sheer overwhelming power of the film's depiction of the horror that we call Vietnam left me emotionally drained. The strongest message reverberating through the movie is the total madness with which the Vietnam War was conducted. In the name of democracy and freedom, which we took upon ourselves to defend anywhere in the world, America found itself mired in the tropical hell of Vietnam--fighting a war with no strategy beyond slaughtering as many Viet Cong as possible, deploying awesomely lethal and destructive technology but without the will...
...SPECIFIC FLAWS of this Don Giovanni will certainly prevent it from bringing opera to a mass audience, and--despite all that film offers opera listeners, financially and technically--it's doubtful the opera movie will ever go over big. Audiences today have trouble sitting through the two-and-a-half hour extravagant spectacle of Apocalypse Now; Losey's three hours of set pieces won't fare any better...
...people who will go see Losey's film are the same people who buy seats for the Metropolitan Opera when it visits Boston each spring, not the great unwashed "masses" who couldn't care less about opera, who would rather see the latest Airport movie than Don Giovanni--or, better yet, go home and turn on the television. To "Mork and Mindy...