Word: mythic
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...conventions of 19th century slave narratives: "Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found by Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored, 1997." Yet our search for narrative unity is frustrated by fragmentation, as all mythic histories and fantasies are. The figures run into each other, and we can hardly determine on which of the Carpenter Center's walls the story begins...
Besides the movie's constant-laugh screenplay, its biggest asset is the performance of Jeff Bridges, who seems to have found the role of his career in the Dude. The Dude lives in small apartment in decidedly un-chic part of L.A., in the already mythic time of "the early '90s," as the film's oddly anachronistic cowboy-narrator tells us. If pressured ever so slightly, the Dude will admit that he's a bum--but it's obviously a term that he takes some pride...
...staff of the Advocate, which sponsored the reading, introduced Bly, a former Advocate editor, as one of the "mythic antecedents" of the magazine...
...swarm" him, a relatively benign technique used to subdue a violent suspect. Nor did it show that after all that, King was charging directly at the officer who first whacked him with a baton. But the videotape became one of those vehicles of Herodotus, carrying at its core a mythic truth that fetched back centuries: white authority brutalizing a black...
...Less mythic, less funny, and much less dear to CP is Yours, Mine and Ours (1968), a treacly lightweight in which Henry Fonda and his ten children get all tangled up with Lucille Ball and her eight. It's The Brady Bunch meets The Swarm (also with Fonda), strictly for chuckle-prone domestic types for whom a gaggle of pouting cherubs are an apt substitute for just about anything. Reasons to watch: a young Tim Matheson, a full decade before Animal House, and a few winning moments involving, yes, pouting cherubs. Plus, after the terrific Mister Roberts, it's good...