Word: linda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film of William Peter Blatty's reasonably entertaining novel is cinematic vomit--in a word, a gross-out. Or maybe two words. Friedkin, whose hit-'em-over the head style should confine him to urban crime thrillers, shoves his disgusting images into our faces in a manner reminiscent of Linda Blair shoving a crucifix into her crotch. Crunch, crunch. Blatty's novel needed: a) someone less pretentious than Blatty to write the screenplay, and b) a director with more of a sense of lyricism and wit, a modern James Whale, or a Hitchcock, or even a DePalma. Friedkin and Blatty...
...culprit has been dubbed "Marijuana Mouse," alias "Happy." Delirious would be more like it. Three times the D.A.'s staff set traps for the mouse, and three times the little felon made off with the bait-more marijuana. Why not try cheese? Says Linda Callahan, the D.A.'s secretary: "We give him what he wants." No dope, that rodent. Nope, no dope...
...materialistic culture. But Malick is an artist, not a polemicist; his scabrous ideas are expressed in the elegiac terms of a fable. In Days of Heaven he tells of a migrant worker, Bill (Richard Gere), who travels from Chicago with his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and his kid sister Linda (Linda Manz) to harvest wheat for an aristocratic Texas farmer (Playwright Sam Shepard). Tired of "nosing around like a pig" and infuriated by his employer's wealth, Bill decides to use the ravishing Abby to bilk the farmer out of his fortune. No sooner does the scheme get going...
...there is no mistaking Days of Heaven for anything other than an American movie. Malick's ability to capture the terror in plain, homespun settings recalls the spooky vistas of Painter Edward Hopper. The film's naive narration-recited in deadpan colloquialisms by the teen-age Linda-is right out of Ring Lardner's sardonic stories. In the tradition of these other native ironists, Malick keeps his distance from his material. Though built around a heartbreaking love triangle, Days of Heaven has no introspective dialogue and no Freudian fireworks. Accordingly, actors have been cast more...
...Linda Wilson...