Word: motel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rise of swinging London, the Profumo scandal, strikes, strife and the sinking of traditions in a new tide of commercialism. The fate of the Swan's Nest, an old inn in the vicinity of Rapstone, is symptomatic: "In the course of time it would be taken over by a motel chain, re-christened Ye Olde Swan's Nest and given piped music, colour TVs in every bedroom . . . an enlarged car park and the Old Father Thames Carvery...
...BEST MOMENT in Robert Altman's film version of Sam Shepard's play Fool For Love comes when the heartsick cowboy Eddie pops a quarter in a motel room Magic Fingers machine. Sprawled out on an unmade queen-size bed, dressed in faded jeans and a trailworn denim jacket, and nursing a tin of day-old Skoal and a bottle of worm-blessed Mexican tequila, Shepard rides the bed like a rundown rodeo star, and when he throws his girl May a particularly wistful smile, all the humor and pathos of Shepard's writing comes shining clean through...
...pepper this psycho-sexual stew with a generous dose of True West mythos (lassos, gunracks, motel notells), an ensemble cast as good as they get, honkytonk lovesongs and sets designed by Levi-Strauss, and you've got yourself a bowl of three-alarm movie-making...
Director Altman has given the claustrophobic tension of Shepard's stageplay breadth and richness without upsetting the mood. The story unfolds in a disheveled motel room, a fenced-in playground, a formica dinerette. The action shifts comfortably from the present to the past, the comic to the tragic, the real to the imagined. And the characters, both skillfully drawn and portrayed, swing with lightning quickness from the pathetic to the courageous, from the cruel to the ridiculous...
...Shepard's play is certainly more than filmed theatre. The world he gives us is tangible and authentic, and no film in recent memory has as meticulous a look. Eddie's truck is a masterpiece of mud and birdcrap, like a Jackson Pollack custom-designed Chevy. May's motel room is a working model for entropy, strewn with dirty underwear and rumpled blouses. And Eddie's adolescent home boasts a velvet painting of John F. Kennedy, while the ghost-daughter of May's own past bounces behind her on a motel bed, and hugs her, crying, in the foreground...