Word: plasticizers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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They whirl around the discotheques, the baths, and the men's room at Grand Central Station, with their clear plastic belts and work boots and Technicolor T-shirts, till Sutherland overdoses and Malone disappears into Long Island Sound. Passion is a cancer; eros and thanatos, interwoven...
Even more remarkable, though, is that Dalen actually gets you to care about Collins. When the brass decide to throw Collins out of his private office because he needs motivation, the line between the victim and the victor gets blurred. Seated there in a bright plastic secretaries room, even Collins can't beat out the system he's been enforcing. As Collins tries to work his way back up to his old status, his coldness takes on a different dimension--it's him against you, and neither party can afford to lose. Dalen manages to pull off this shift without...
This entire sequence is an unnerving sojourn into the cost of plastic happiness. Unfortunately, the producers felt compelled to tack a happy ending onto this film--an ending which is so satisfying that it doesn't work. But even this cannot kill what has gone before. Dalen so successfully blurs the distinction between the consumer and the seller (something else) that the disquieting aspects of his film just can't get lost. The happy ending elates for a moment but then in light of the rest of the film it's a bogus note. But aside from this, this...
...SOME OF MY friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead," crooned Elvis Costello in a raspy, tortured voice on his last album. Costello--the little guy in the seedy suit and black plastic glasses--sounds worried himself on his latest release. He's always powered his songs with two emotions, woman-hating sexual frustration and corporate paranoia. On Armed Forces, the paranoia takes over and twists his music into some very strange, chilly shapes and sounds...
...together, fingers laced behind his back, arms flapping. Understandably puzzled, the Army psychiatrist in charge summons the patient's boyhood friend from the Philadelphia suburbs and asks him to try to break through this strange behavior. Al Columbato brings his own problems with him. He is recovering from plastic surgery on his jaw, smashed in Germany, and from the knowledge of his own profound cowardice under fire. He is not sure that his old buddy in the cell is in any worse shape than he is. "Come on, Birdy," he says, when the two are alone...