Word: larner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...back the production, out of a gut level reaction against what was happening in Vietnam if he had personal politics at all they were directed against our totalitarian cultural blandness and could not be specified particularly by the star of Marooned and The Chairman. Later talks with Jeremy Larner screenwriter of The Candidate and Ron O'Neal, the star of Super Fly did manage to reveal real intentions behind their respective huts...
About one month after The Candidate opened in Boston. I met Jeremy Larner at a small French restaurant on Boylston Street. As I had given the film an unfavorable review (which he of course disagreed with). Larher had not been particularly anxious to talk. But he did, in fact, provide amiable enough. Looking very much as you imagined Hector Bloom, the Jewish college basketball star of Larner's first novel, Drive. He said, he spoke with an engaging humor to his edgines, though the presence of a taciturn political friend, who contributed an occasional grunt or mumble and proved invisible...
...straightforward: as McKay comes ever-closer to winning his prize, he must rely ever-more on TV and other mass media to win his audience, in the process becoming less of a statesman, but a potent show-biz vote-getter. However, whether director Michael Ritchie and screenwriter Jeremy Larner feel this process necessary, and McKay's actions morally justified, is unclear. In the context of easy ironies that the film develops, in which all men are power-hungry or venal on a solely personal level, it is foolish to invoke moral considerations at all: though I presume that the attitude...
Apart from its serious pretensions, the film is consistently entertaining. Larner's dialogue is deadly accurate: it takes a sharp ear to pick up the proper colloquial uses of such Yiddishism as "schmuck" and "kischkes"; to imitate to perfection varying political jargons, from Jarmon's "the individuals made this country great" to McKay's "we're all in this (mess) together"; to invent speech idiosyncrasies which seal characters' fates for us, like a noxious emcee's "unequivocably...
...Candidate is not about the Kennedys, though their resonances are present; nor McCarthy, though whole incidents are openly borrowed from Larner's own campaign experiences; nor about McGovern, though George's campaign seems to have followed the same route as Bill McKay's. Finally, the film's central figure is nowhere as serious as any of these men, and the film fails to engage us importantly because of this