Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...plot. De Funès appears as a racist bourgeois, a prideful Catholic preparing for his daughter's wedding. His chauffeur, who is Jewish, has relatives arriving from New York. There is a car accident, but the chauffeur refuses to help, since it is after sun down Friday-the start of the Sabbath, when Orthodox Jews do not work-so De Funès must extricate himself all on his own. Meanwhile, near the crash scene a gang of Middle Eastern terrorists chases after one of their political leaders, trying to torture information about the underground...
...facing charges of unfair competition and a civil suit for not complying with the regulations of the California Cemetery Board. What is unfair, it seems, is that Telophase does not hold title to either a cemetery or a crematorium, has not posted a $25,000 endowment bond insuring proper plot care, and refuses to hire a licensed staff cemetery broker. "We have a chapel and an embalming room, and they cost money," objects one San Diego funeral director. "We have to provide certain things, and so should they." "All we want to do is haul ashes to sea," counters Telophase...
Though the plot is like a Ross Macdonald garden of sin buried and retribution delayed, the book resembles a conventional detective story only when Mark Smith's whim turns to parody. Like the two dozen other fully drawn figures who crowd the story, Detective Magnuson seems something less than real, and neither the reader-nor the author-is sure just how seriously to take...
...Fruit Loops may become tomorrow's Oval Oaties or Glazed Grainos, so Bill's job today as a magazine editor may be tomorrow's trip to the pawnshop, and so Charlie's extravagant spending today may be tomorrow's hustle for a meal. In this movie almost totally without plot or character development, the imminence of change, the ubiquity of contingency, predominate, and as with the wheel of fortune Charlie spins in a Reno casino at the end of the film, it is not a particular number at the end that is important, but the simple fact of its spinning...
This is what was so fascinating about California Split. As Altman himself has described the movie, it is "an atmospheric film about gambling. It has no story, no plot, but it does have a progression." It is the same progression as the unfolding highway. The movie's obtrusive sense of present, constructed from the fast win and fast loss, the tension of a big money poker game, the green felt of a Reno crap table, a bowl of Fruit Loops for breakfast, flashes by with the same dreamy transcience as Colorado mountains, Utah salt flats, Nevada deserts, and California farms...