Word: ghosts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Watching Horowitz unsuccessfully trying to shatter glass with a high note recorded on Memorex tape is a little like watching Houdini expose a séance. Commercials are viewed as a kind of ghost hunting; the greater fun is for viewers to see how they are being fooled, to see the bamboozler bamboozled. Most of the products Horowitz tests pass with high marks-he estimates 75%-but the blood sport is watching the advertisers turn into bozos when Horowitz can't wipe the scrawl off the Sherwin-Williams paint job, when three dozen eggs (out of 14 dozen...
...half-century of Astaire in the movies has made his achievement seem both ineffable and inevitable. Even today, at 82, Astaire is lithe and healthy as he waltzes through the occasional film role. In his latest, Ghost Story, due out next month, Astaire and three other elderly gents (Melvyn Douglas, John Houseman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) swap spooky tales. The oddest might be the one about Fred's rise to stardom. Fifty years ago, it was difficult to spot a potential movie star in a body that photographed small, frail, bewildered. Fred and his sister Adele had danced through...
...some scenes, Willy talks loudly to a not-present individual, and Miller reconstructs the imaginary speaker for the audience, although he remains invisible to the other characters. Willy implores the ghost, Willy's older brother. "Ben, what's the secret to success? Did I do something wrong?" James Bohnen plays Ben's phantom with such presence one feels like reaching out and touching his huge tweed overcoat as he roams around the aisles in the audience. He replies repeatedly, "Willy, when I was 17, I went into the jungle. When I was 21, I came out. And damned...
...most matter-of-fact images is of an orange tree, the fruit dully glistening with the heavy shine of late summer, some leaves almost metallic in density, others a little blurred as the wind stirs them. Into this ecstatically concrete world, a ghost intrudes: the shadow of Atget and his shrouded camera falling across a cabbage plant. Mere shades that whisper "I was here" and so wrench the image away from objectivity toward that sense of mutual dependence between viewer and view that lay at the heart of modernism...
HIGH BUDGET FILMS often substitute extravagant endings for meaningful ones, distracting, rather than satisfying us. Some, like the Bond films, require extravagant endings to satisfy the suspense. Thomas has picked a genre which requires not extravagance, but skill. Yet she supplies neither. This ghost story can not succeed without an effective ending, one in which the ghost and its victim confront each other squarely. In The Haunting of M, the ghost is never vanquished, merely disappointed by Marianna. Thomas ending seems muted in its Victorian delicacy. Marion, wrapped in such timeless wrath, should be less amenable to the coquettish defenses...