Word: plotlessness
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...Sondheim-as-Jacques-Brel image to which Marry Mc A Little pays homage is among the more limited of these roles, perhaps because it is set so firmly in one particular milieu. The songs that make up this essentially plotless revue about a man and woman--each alone on a Saturday night in the same apartment building--could not possibly refer to any society but that of upper-middle-class singles in Manhattan. There are references to reading the Sunday Times, or Saturday night prowling various bars, putting up with parents and their querulous worries about their kids...
...Frank O. Gehry, Available Light is less a milestone than a signpost. Today's avant-garde has had to circle back on its forebears: the same impulse that gave rise earlier in this century to atonal music and flamboyant attitudes in dance now deals in the certainties of plotless movement and assertive major triads...
Rhapsody is a plotless, technical tour de force, brilliantly danced by the suave Anthony Dowell in a version slightly revised from the original seen in London a year ago. Dowell also danced the lead in Ashton's 1976 narrative ballet A Month in the Country, inspired by Turgenev and Chopin. One of Ashton's supremely bittersweet works, it demonstrates, together with Rhapsody, the septuagenarian's continuing artistic vitality...
...makes no apologies for this plotless venture to the Stardust Hotel (the name comes from a great Louis Armstrong tune), a seaside resort where a nebbishy but successful movie director renowned for his "early comedies" is lecturing at a film symposium. The film's transparent structure is almost non-existent; Stardust Memories begins aboard a commuter train to hell (a Staten Island grabage dump?) and ends under the twinkly lights of the hotel's screening room. Along the way Allen abandons coherence, chronology, and even comic timing. He jumps between love affairs, fantasies, and his distorted sense of reality...
...first murder is one of the most revolting yet put on film. It put me off my popcorn, and I'm not easily nauseated. Alien operates thereafter on our anticipation of similar blood and guts; the tension is totally mechanical and rather unfair. The movie proves witless, plotless, pointless, spectacularly unoriginal, and surprisingly cruel...