Word: mad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
EFFECTIVE propaganda is invariably simple-minded: nuances leave room for doubts, subtlety leaves room for interpretation. Frank and Eleanor Perry, who directed David and Lisa, have made Diary of a Mad Housewife into a good deal more than a mere fleshed-out case study for advocates of Women's Liberation. Carrie Snodgrass, as the harassed housewife nagged to distraction by her socially-climbing husband (Richard Benjamin), makes a token rebellion in her affair with a semi-famous writer who turns out to be equally odious. They are horrible not only because they are men but because they are horrible. Snodgrass...
...Perrys' talent, on the other hand, lies not in such wide generalities or analysis but in acute perception, in stacking up details to make a convincing picture of one mad housewife. Tina clarifies the position of the housewife in general, but she is no flat generalization. And for once children are portrayed without any of the usual cuteness: Tina's two girls are devoid of any charm. They are brats pure and simple. Benjamin is slimy and nervous, like a persnickety housewife himself: everything must be just so-the salad, the furniture, the damson plum preserves. Snodgrass' real housewife...
...Jonathan Miller only know what this pseudo-Jungian nonsense has to do with Hamlet. Miller has decided that Hamlet, rather than feigning madness, is really mad, and has given a psychological interpretation to the play. Unfortunately, the text will not bear it. While Miller's actor cavorts about the stage like something out of The Golden Bough, Shakespeare's text is depicting a hero acting more from pietas than paranoia. The conflict between Shakespeare's Hamlet and Miller's destroys the play...
...example, Margot Kidder, a Love Story hater ("Two marshmallow people marching around trying to be brave") and one of the great bodies of the Western world as well as the Tomato Surprise of Quackser Fortune. Or Carrie Snodgress, unforced, radiant star of the arch, dim Diary of a Mad Housewife. Perhaps the most technically skilled of the new romanticists, she insists...
...film about alienation which seemed to cut away to a Laszlo Kovacs Easy Rider scenic vista whenever something seemed about to happen; Alan Arkin's Yossarian in Mike Nichols' Catch-22; Carrie Snodgress's heroine and Frank Perry's paranoiac camera work in the somewhat overdrawn Diary of a Mad Housewife; Charles Bronson's headstrong investigator in Rene Clement's Rider on the Rain; the dripping decadence and provocative idea behind Performance; and the grand style of Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon and Michel Bouquet in the overly maligned Jacques Deray cartoon known as Borsalino...