Word: films
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is nothing unpredictable about Bob Fosse: this gifted director-choreographer has shown the same strengths and weaknesses throughout his stage and film career. As a showman, he has no equal. Music, performers, movement, lighting, costumes and sets all blend together in Fosse productions to create brilliant flashes of exhilarating razzle-dazzle. Yet the man just does not know when to leave well enough alone. Too often Fosse insists on fusing entertainment with superficially conceived Big Themes. Certainly musicals have a right to be serious, but Fosse's song-and-dance flights into the metaphysical are less illuminating than...
Nowhere is the director's artistic schizophrenia more apparent or disturbing than in All That Jazz, a highly personal film that swings wildly from the sublime to the ridiculous. For half its length, Jazz is a knowing and witty tour of high-powered show biz, with Fosse as the guide. The film's hero, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), is a driven director-choreographer who not only looks like Fosse but also shares his personal and professional history. As Gideon rehearses a new musical that recalls Chicago and edits a new movie that resembles Lenny, he carries on harried...
...biggest problem with Steven Spielberg's 1941 is its budget: this film is the most expensive Hollywood farce ever made. Certainly money has its uses in movies, but in a comedy? A key element of humor is surprise; jokes are funniest when they sneak up on the audience out of nowhere. In big-budget film making, the opportunities for comic am bush quickly disappear. Every joke announces itself in deafening stereo sound. Every pratfall is as momentous as Cecil B. DeMille's parting of the, Red Sea. Punch lines cannot be thrown away, but are instead hurled like...
...matched parts of The Russians Are Coming, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Animal House, The War of the Worlds and I Wanna Hold Your Hand (also written by the Lorraine team of Zemeckis and Gale). Set around Los Angeles right after Pearl Harbor, the film shows what might have happened if panicky Californians had convinced themselves that they were under Japanese at tack. The frantic characters come in all ages and types. There are jitterbugging kids at a USO dance (Treat Williams, Bobby DiCicco), trigger-happy soldiers and pilots (Dan Aykroyd, Warren Gates, John Be lushi...
While it was generous of Spielberg to employ so large a percentage of the Screen Actors Guild, the huge cast almost immobilizes the movie. It takes too long to establish who everyone is and to knit all the plot strands together. Even though the film is relentlessly busy - there seems to be a physical gag in every shot - it has little of the director's usual narrative drive. The movie's story does not so much move forward as gradually selfdestruct. At times 1941 drags to a com- plete and stultifying halt: a lengthy dancehall brawl, conceived along...