Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nominally about the spiritual agonies of a basketball star at a large university, the movie makes several elaborate feints at symbolism, then quickly collapses under the weight of its petrified pretensions. Nicholson seems to be after a kind of existential melodrama: the basketball player frozen by his own spiritual malaise, with his roommate, the campus radical who goes mad in the last reel, representing the inevitable result of purposeful action in an insane world. But the film is too incoherent to sustain such interpretations. The action sways sloppily between the ballplayer and the radical, straddling an unwieldy subplot concerning...
...excised John Jaymes of Young American Enterprises, Sam Cutler, the Dead with their bright ideas, once you've reduced Belli to a harmless comic figure, and the Stones to unwitting spectators of their own spectacle, who's loft but the Angels, and what's left but another melodrama, one in which beefy Alfred Jarrys play the villains, and everyone else the innocents. A self-defined outlaw gag, but not the kind of outlaws that sign million dollar contracts, the Angels are denied appeal. Though Grace Slick says, "People get weird and we need the Angels to keep people in line...
...record of the journey is Glen and Randa, a primitive, desperate odyssey by the last bewildered survivors of an atomic holocaust, stumbling through the wreckage of a vanished civilization. Neither moralizing sci-fi nor melodrama, despite its fanciful premise, the film is rather like a cinéma vérité doomsday documentary-a parable in newsreel form...
...moneyed man's San Francisco, and Hero Worshiper Snell going through the day-today hassles of making a tentative kind of life for himself and his family. Kaylor captures scenes and feelings-fac-tores, roadhouses, dancehalls, motorcycles-that make similar attempts in Joe look like musty melodrama...
...Buttercup Chain is a leaden comedy-melodrama about the intramurals two young couples play as they wander around England, Spain and Sweden. The characters are in their early 20s, but by comparison to the children in the other youth pictures, they seem to be drifting into senility, an impression strongly reinforced by their mummified acting. Jane Asher and Sven-Bertil Taube are attractive and easy enough to take, but Hywel Bennett looks like a cross between Paul McCartney and Elmer Fudd. Then there is doe-eyed Leigh Taylor-Young, an actively bad actress who improves only when she takes...