Word: janowitz
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Billed as a "guide to the books everyone talks about and some people even read," Spy Notes satirizes hip, urban novels. A chapter synopsis of a Tama Janowitz novel: "Eleanor goes to Wilfredo's apartment for a dinner party. The couples are all men. The reader understands that Wilfredo is homosexual. Eleanor does not. This is called dramatic irony...
Screenplay by Tama Janowitz...
They should have filmed Tama Janowitz's publicity campaign. It was a lot more entertaining, and possibly more sociologically edifying, than Slaves of New York, the collection of short stories about the downtown art scene that book flacks so heedlessly hyped to bestsellerdom. Alas, the movie people got stuck with the book and with its author as screenwriter. And now the public is stuck with a movie that compares rather unfavorably to periodontal work in amusement value...
Sustained, coherent narrative is not, shall we say, Janowitz's great strength, and neither is dramatic characterization. Eleanor (the normally perky, cuddly Bernadette Peters in sadly deflated condition) is a designer of funky hats who suffers from a possibly justifiable weakness of the ego. She lives with a graffiti artist named Stash (Adam Coleman Howard) who has a definitely unjustified air of superiority. Before they finally break up, this tedious pair go to many noisy parties and performance-art evenings. Along the way, art-world fights, flirtations and fornications are noted but not explored in a script that is always...
...fault is not entirely Janowitz's. Her only hope was to find a director who could either respond avidly to the sexual and creative energies of the avant-garde scene or take a satirical cudgel to it. Instead, she drew distant, enervated James Ivory (A Room with a View, Heat and Dust, The Bostonians), who never seems to engage fully with any subject he has tackled and who has never been more fastidiously withdrawn than he is here. In this case, however, audiences will be well advised to follow his example...