Word: loved
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Romance has not just gone crazy in the City of the One Night Stands, it's gone kaput, period. The most unsettling facet of this death-of-love motif is the pervasiveness of its reality among the film's otherwise diverse characters. The malaise afflicts the professionally fulfilled executive (Harvey Keitel) as deeply as his hopelessly unfulfilled housewife (Geraldine Chaplin), who fancies herself a modernday Camille, running around spouting melodrama and sipping Carroll's Southern Comfort between lines. It fails to discriminate between John Considine's hail-fellow-well-met furniture dealer and Carradine's petulant artiste. With one noteworthy...
...bereavement. But the confessions of Oliver Barrett IV are conspicuously uninteresting. Page after page, Ollie exorcises his guilt for the excesses of his forebears, who exploited workers for generations in order to accumulate a spectacular fortune. Oliver is in position to inherit the tainted millions he rejected in Love Story, depending on Jenny, fostering his guilt over her death...
Segal's gall in using the same homogenized success formula is annoying. Love Story was somewhat ingenuous the first time, but this time around Segal's clearly going for the gold. In this version the style is too cute and unoriginal to succeed. But there's an even more irksome side to the Segal works for Harvard readers. Segal's portrayal of Harvard is distorted, yet it is the one that millions of Americans apparently want to believe. The syndrome is a familiar one: Segal obviously fell head over heels in love with Harvard and all its money-encrusted trappings...
Those who like Love Story will probably like Oliver's Story, too. Those who found Love Story a slick collection of sentimental, tear-jerking trash will hate Oliver's Story just as much, if not more. Still, Oliver's Story currently is near the top of the bestseller lists, notwithstanding a conspicuous lack of quality. It makes you wonder again what people will read, and what kind of images they prefer to have place before them...
...least there was love involved the first time around...