Word: pleasante
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Despite these objections, Just Above My Head is a very moving work, carried along by the intensity of the author's own feelings. His painful discovery of his need for human contact, family, and identity makes inspiring, if not pleasant, reading. And though his protagonists are black, his message applies to whites as well: the more drastically our lives change, the more we all need each other's love, he seems to be saying. Even Time could agree with that...
Ivory might have been helpful, but he is a careful and slightly anemic director, unable to dig out tensions lurking beneath his correct, bland surfaces. The result is a pleasant, pretty entertainment. One suspects that this film is outside its natural element on a theatrical screen, that its mod est virtues would shine to better advantage on PBS. If we had a properly functioning public broadcasting system in the country, American classics like The Europeans might be produced with funds and talent in profusion...
...attractive people and against chilly, faceless institutions is an understandable one. After all, if we are to enjoy these tales we must, for the length of the film, set aside conventional morality to root for the criminals and against their victims. But in this film the crooks are so pleasant that they practically recede to ectoplasmic levels before our eyes, while the bank they set out to heist is so anonymous that it does not provide them with a properly menacing nemesis. The result is one of the least offensive but also least memorable crime movies of the year...
...four incumbents for which the CCC will campaign all voted against rent controls and attempts to control condominium conversion, and none of the challengers picked by the group was willing or able to gain the support of the Rent Control Task Force. City council meetings might be more pleasant if the CCC were to succeed, when the votes were counted, but rent control would probably go out the window with a speed belying "moderation...
...will provoke, frighten and outrage even those already jaded by the sleaziness and corruption of Watergate. Richard Helms and the old boys at the CIA would have been much happier it Thomas Powers and others like him never bothered to look inside their murky closed. It may not be pleasant, but it is important and necessary to inspect those skeletons and pick the bones clean; we can learn from the post-mortems how better to fight the disease...