Word: futzing
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Peter and Katherine (Peter Weller and Judy Davis) are bored and careless. They lose jobs, take on lovers, futz around with guru-driven spirituality and dress to the nines. You could argue, as writer-director Michael Tolkin doubtless did when he was pitching The New Age, that they are perfect exemplars of chic anomie as it manifests itself in postmodern -- or postrational -- Los Angeles. You could also argue, as people whose malls don't yet contain an Issey Miyake boutique might, that they are hopeless twits...
THEATRICAL tricks are the trademark of Tom O'Horgan, the Superstar director. He turned Futz, nominally a modest little play about bestiality, into a Dionysian celebration with actors writhing all over the stage in transports of pagan ecstasy. In Hair O'Horgan set a similar kind of group grope to a rock upbeat. In Lenny, a crowd of gigantic papier-mâché figures symbolizing his fantasies loom over the doomed comic Lenny Bruce. In Jesus Christ Superstar, O'Horgan has characters descend grandly from on high?now in a huge mysterious whalebone basket, now on a platform designed like...
Anti-Church Mélange. O'Horgan, who honed his free-flowing, choreographic style of staging at off-off-Broadway's Cafe La Mama and in the productions of Tom Paine, Futz and most famously Hair, emerges in Lenny as one of the top directors of the U.S. theater. He manages to meld Bruce's sleazy world of one-night stands, his marital hopes and horrors, his helpless, raging entanglement in the courts, and even his vaulting fantasies into a fluid continuum up, down and around the multilevel stage. Lenny was a microphone man; mikes perpetually...
...Futz loves his pig. That isn't graffiti; it's a plot. Futz is an Appalachian farmer whose great pleasure in life is making love to a porker named Amanda. Naturally, his narrow-minded neighbors are upset. The village slut plots revenge on Farmer Futz after he invites Amanda along on a tryst. She persuades a local homicidal maniac to claim that he killed a village girl only after seeing Futz and Amanda in the throes of passion. That's grounds right there for the sheriff to grab Futz and toss him into jail, where the indignant...
...moving plea for the tolerance of sodomists, or a fearless indictment of soil erosion. It makes no difference, and neither, really, does the movie. Based on Rochelle Owens' play and enacted by a group of wildly undisciplined shock troops who call themselves the La Mama Repertory Troupe,* Futz is merely a piece of fraudulent and fearsomely noisy theater of outrage. O'Horgan ceaselessly has his actresses jumping up and entwining their legs around any available male waist; and his notion of "new cinema" is to photograph scenes of idyllic love in slow motion and scenes of bestial passion...