Word: gideons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Supreme Court, and on May 31, 1962, he was executed by hanging.) The apparent purpose of his memoir was to bolster his chances of a reprieve and to arouse public sympathy. Eichmann asked his defense attorney, Robert Servatius, to seek permission for its publication. The trial prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, refused; then Premier David Ben-Gurion ordered that the manuscript be suppressed for 15 years and placed in the state archives. Its existence was known to only a few people...
...next level is Metaphysical. Gideon holds conversations with a mysterious and beautiful Lady in White in a ghostly nightclub, surrounded by vaudevillian props and masks out of his past. They provide running commentary on the Physical level and play illuminating word association games. This is lazy writing, made even more irritating by its artsiness. If Fosse and Aurthur knew how to integrate psychological observations into the lines themselves (which is what drama is all about), they wouldn't need to have characters look into the screen and say, "You're this, Joe; you're that, Joe." They would show...
...third level is Fantasy, expressed in over-blown production numbers. At one point in the movie, Gideon watches from his hospital bed as a pretentious television critic tears apart The Stand-up, rating it half-a-balloon out of a possible four. Among her criticisms: "Razzle-dazzle obliterates story." Well, in All That Jazz, Fosse has integrated the razzle-dazzle into the movie's themes with solemn thoroughness. It's a clever idea to present a choreographer's nightmares as gaudy, Dantesque versions of Busby Berkeley, but the movie has four of these sequences and they're not short. (They...
...perception of the Director himself. The furious cutting, multiple perspectives and numerous alienation devices cannot help shifting attention to the man behind the camera and his relationship to the film audience. (If the cutting is any indication, Fosse is back on Dexedrine.) One wonders whether Bob Fosse, like Joe Gideon, really knows where the bullshit ends and the truth begins. This kind of work is the last resort of the bullshit artist trying to express the truth, by giving you the bullshit and simultaneously telling you it's bullshit--which leaves us, of course, back where we started...
...responsibility of the artist to supply his audience with some sort of coherent overview--even if it's a warped overview, even if he is creating in a desperate attempt to stave off despair or insanity. Silly thought: When Bob Fosse filmed Joe Gideon filming himself in a hospital bed, did he glance uneasily over his own shoulder...