Word: friedkins
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...Exorcist. William Friedkin's film of William Peter Blatty's reasonably entertaining novel is cinematic vomit--in a word, a gross-out. Or maybe two words. Friedkin, whose hit-'em-over the head style should confine him to urban crime thrillers, shoves his disgusting images into our faces in a manner reminiscent of Linda Blair shoving a crucifix into her crotch. Crunch, crunch. Blatty's novel needed: a) someone less pretentious than Blatty to write the screenplay, and b) a director with more of a sense of lyricism and wit, a modern James Whale, or a Hitchcock, or even...
Coma would be negligible, except that it epitomizes everything wrong with most movie thrillers these days: they have become clinical. Directors like Michael Crichton and William Friedkin put their audiences under the scalpel, and so far audiences have responded enthusiastically. Even good movies like Marathon Man are so crammed with sliced hands and slit throats that they're hard to watch, and films have to be gorier and gorier now to make an impression. It's part of a de-sensitizing, or perhaps, in the case of Coma, an anesthetizing of the audience. No wonder audiences are bored with those...
...American sports. James Caan is macho-competent, as usual, and the sets are something--the crowd scenes for this amalgamation of roller derby and first degree assault were filmed in the Olympic Stadium in Munich. In a way, it's a shame--in the hands of a William Friedkin, this could have been a 90-minute reminder that the future does not belong to us. Instead it's a two-and-a-half hour monstrolsity. Stay home and read The Silmarrilon this weekend...
...sorcerers in it (aside from the trucks that are the real stars of the movie), which is indicative of the scriptwriters' skill in making connections and telling a story. The movie makes little sense; with its atmosphere of grimy, relentless boredom, it provides even less pleasure. Billy Friedkin directed The French Connection, then he directed The Exorcist; with Sorcerer, he accelerates this downward trend...
...helps get us through a middle passage where Roy Scheider, as the punk criminal, and Bruno Cremer, as the banker, are seen to suffer interminable misery in some of the most squalid squalor anybody this side of a PBS documentarian has put on a screen in a long time. Friedkin has probably been more rigorous about all this than the requirements of popular film making dictate. Since he has an international cast working in a foreign locale, much of the dialogue is translated in subtitles, which is going to cause a certain impatience in the action houses...