Word: pasteboard
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There is little to boast of here. The original play has been transported to the screen apparently by moving van. The sets might pass muster on a stage but look like pasteboard before the camera lens. Director Mark Robson records the action from a static position corresponding to front row center. The actors pass before the camera, mouthing lines of thimble-witted dialogue ("There stand the loins from which you sprang"; "Everything you do is so tragically irrelevant") that are open pleas for some heavy editing...
...camp. He sues Cady for libel because of a sentence that strayed into Cady's blockbuster novel, The Holocaust, which casually charges Kelno with performing "15,000 or more experimental operations without use of anesthesia." The surgery involved sterilization and mutilation of sexual organs. After setting up these pasteboard people, Uris embarks on a lengthy trial scene in which the grizzly camp testimony unfolds...
...while railing at the pasteboard void, Rosen also admits to having learned to play its games with a real sense of bravura. Gassed on the streets of Chicago during the '68 demonstrations, Rosen's mind flashes from childhood memories of cajoling his parent's friends with smiles and jokes and pleasant words to playing the martyr scenes for the sake of the familiar suburban mother-type behind the oversized wheel of the Camaro before which he stumbles in temporary confusion. "I am so accustomed to my mastery of mothers that this sudden and irritating turn of events unnerves...
Fuck the celebrities, though, for inside the suburban elegance of the plastic-and-turquoise theatre, the team was already whooping it up. Admittedly, the hors d'oeuvres weren't much more than pasteboard decorations, but then the champagne had already begun to compensate for that. Around the refreshment counter, which had been entirely given over to dispensing the stuff-despite the disappointment of one girl who demanded to know "Where you can get a candy bar around there?"-the crowd was packed tighter than a bunch of high school girls trying to extract autographs from Bobby Orr. And that...
HOMER is a well-intentioned film about a young man's growing intolerance for his parents, his home town and his life in Middle America. Too often the script is predictable, the situations pure pasteboard. But Director John Trent has a subtle feeling for the nuances of small-town life, and scenes such as a going-away party for a Viet Nam-bound soldier are filled with a sense of quiet poetry that might have pleased Sherwood Anderson. In the cast are Tisa Farrow, Mia's preternaturally sensual younger sister, and (as Homer) a robust young actor named...