Word: maxed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fault lies not with Hoffman's performance, but with the movie's narrow, spartan script. The screenwriters are so eager to avoid sentimentality that they turn journalistic objectivity into a form of dramatic Novocain. As we watch Burglar Max Dembo doggedly pursue his career of luckless crime, it is impossible to feel anything but numbness. Apparently the writers believe it is enough to demonstrate that Max is a classic recidivist, trapped forever in a cycle of antisocial behavior, but they can't get off so easily. A character as alienated as Max, however realistically drawn, becomes compelling...
There is no context to Straight Time; the movie is all matter-of-fact incidents. Max gets out of jail on parole, breaks parole, commits burglaries and awaits certain reincarceration. While one is grateful that the script does not explain Max's self-destructiveness with handwringing, Freudian sermons, Straight Time might at least have explored the existential meaning of his criminal joyrides. The movie chooses instead to rub our noses in the sad predictability of Max's life, as if sheer gloom were its own reward...
Rudely stated, German expressionism was the house style of radical figurative art in Northern Europe between about 1905 and 1930. But as Selz rightly insists in his catalogue essay, it was less a style than a cluster of attitudes. The major expressionist painters-Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Max Pechstein, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Lyonel Feininger-did have formal traits in common. Harsh, dissonant color that blared fitfully from an unrefined surface; jagged shapes, broken-bottle cubism, an appetite for the primitive in drawing; masklike faces, Gothic poses, extreme jumps of tone between limelight and gloom...
...dumb blonde: appear on a local New York talk show whose host asks, "How tall are you?" and "How much do you weigh?" Tiegs does her best with the material. "Five-ten," she says, her face alive and warm, the sparkle in her eyes working at perhaps 55% of max; "One-twenty." She ballooned up to 155 lbs., she says, just after she and her husband Stan Dragoti, a well-established TV commercial maker, were married, and she dropped out of modeling. Then she stopped eating fattening foods ?"Sorry," she says, "but that's the secret...
...CAPTIVE OF TIME by Olga Ivinskaya Translated by Max Hayward Doubleday; 462 pages...