Word: locusts
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...Locust Valley...
...Heretic, Father Richard Burton arrives from the Vatican to search out Pazuzu in Linda's soul, and meanwhile have a religion-science face-off with Psychiatrist Louise Fletcher, who wants to do the job by hypnosis. Pazuzu gets mad as a hornet - or rather as a locust, the guise in which he usually appears. He makes Linda's eyes glow and flings her postpubescent body about like a beanbag. Soon she is back in that bedroom in Georgetown, where Burton tries to rip the heart - literally - out of her possessed alter...
...truth, the only synthesis in the film is between the ludicrous and the unintentionally comic. Locusts swarming over the Capitol dome, an Ethiopian church ceremony that looks like a Coptic version of Regine's, James Earl Jones brooding in locust headdress - the choice moments are many. The question raised by this fiasco is whether Burton is going to go down like John Barrymore, hamming his way through unworthy vehicles that feed off travesties of his talent...
...time I saw Citizen Kane. He remembered too, and we compared gurgled memories of How It Was the First Time. This is a fairly routine thing to discuss, I realize; in New York, Oxnard, Peru, Indiana, and bless it, Kaplan, Louisiana, hums of versation rising from cafeteria tables like locust clouds, and if you poll each little bug here's what he'll say: "The first time I saw Fred Astaire dance I was transfixed...after the first time I saw the Seventh Seal I couldn't win a chess game for a month...the first time I saw Abbott...
...terms because he made more money than Faulkner, spent his last years in Hollywood meditating on his own limitations. Nathanael West, forgotten in the basement of a second-rate studio where he slaved night and day to write cheap gangster flicks, had his vengeance in The Day of the Locust; where all of America was portrayed as a Hollywood burlesque. And James Agee, who left lucrative positions as film critic for Time and The Nation to write screenplays finished his days writing sad, haunting scripts of empty hotels and circus elephants which to this day have not been produced...