Word: neon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lots of places around here," says Miner Roy Phillips of Neon, Ky., "those doghole mines are the only things you can make a living at. It's not greed, it's survival." Yet the manager of one huge Kentucky mine finds that trade-off untenable. Says he: "This isn't like mom-and-pop stores any more. If we continue to pretend that it is, the price will be paid in miners' lives...
...names were Diana Leigh and Valerie Lynn, girls whose names ran together if their faces did not; of hunting in crisp mornings for pheasant and grouse on ground that crackled as you walked over it. But Dreamland and remained gray; gray shadows broken and heightened by little bands of neon, when the Bells of the past spoke to Thomas Scott Bell at Harvard, calling in his own mind to him above the clutter and emotion of being tremendously alone in a tone of evil desperation, as if he was their last foothold in the world beyond Dreamland, beyond the world...
...Danny Daniels, and at times hilarious, these forays into the protagonists' fantasy lives provide a welcome respite from the general gloom. As director Herbert Ross leads us relentlessly from one depression cliche to another--the deserted prairie highway, the Edward Hopper diner, the seedy hotel room complete with flashing neon sign outside the window and the El rumbling past--the song and dance numbers become an escape, not only for Arthur and Eileen, but for the audience as well. And there's a lot to escape in Pennies from Heaven. For Arthur and Eileen, sexual exploitation, grim poverty, murder...
...pathological individualism that we are given here, and we always go for that. DeNiro exhilarates us in Mean Streets because he's his own man even when geing his own man is absolutely self-destructive craziness. He's burning with it. In this subterranean world of dumpsters and neon and bar-darkness, racketeers and ferret-faced, small-time hoods, he dares to be a total jerk. He's the problem child who won't stop playing, hyperactively needling the frayed nerves of the others, and exploding in careless bravura. He is wired. Johnny Boy digs the risk and the rock...
Long Shot #1: The Theater--If you stand across the street, you see the back wall of the Brattle Theater. It is 9:30 on a Friday night and the number of pedestrians crossing the shot is high. They barely register except as flashes light and movement under the neon and flourescent lights...