Word: phrased
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...screen remains black. Suddenly, from out of the blue, there flashes a phrase, a sentence--some concatenation of words on the screen that abruptly intrudes on this bedroom scene. What can it announce, appearing as it does so unexpectedly and with such strident urgency? "Election Day: November 1968," it blurts, and in the process hints to us that this is no mere sexual elbow-ribbing we are about to witness, but a story, an episode, an adventure that promises to make some comment on the more serious, more profound events that transgress in executive corridors and legislative cloakrooms...
LOOKING BACK on this opening scene after having seen the whole movie, I think maybe Shampoo could have better used as its mood-setting phrase a riddle I spotted on a bathroom wall a few years back: "Why was Nixon never circumcised?" "Because there's no end to that prick." Much more accurately than the portentous statement, "Election Day: November 1968," such a gem of grafitti would have reflected the end of Shampoo's analysis of human behavior. It would have prepared us for what follows, a farce in which the wanton insatiable cocks and cunts of Los Angeles suburbanites...
...said that the deserters were voting with their feet. Most American politicians would have indignantly rejected that idea--its most obvious application last week was to the Saigon troops who deserted, fled, or went over to the NLF--but this did not prevent them from seizing triumphantly on the phrase. Nevertheless, no reporter in Indochina attributed the mass flight to the simple fear of Communism the politicians cited. Instead, reporters spoke of a combination of factors--fear of renewed American bombing, fear of NLF "reprisals," fear of looters from the Saigon army, and a vague but pervasive terror that swept...
...Duels. Logic - or perhaps clear thinking is the better phrase - is the key to the success of both pictures. One does not want to bear down too heavily on the point lest the fun go out of the watching; but the reason both films work so well is that Lester is satirizing not merely that outdated movie form, the heavily romanticized historical spectacle, but history itself. When Lester's people fall off horses or into mud puddles, scramble about trying to have a picnic on a battlement, or try to duel on an icy river where they cannot even...
...intellectual gadfly, he makes a compassionate statement for all the mavericks and pariahs who refuse to become, in Max Weber's phrase, "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart...