Word: rafelson
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...FALL is like a whore house on Sunday morning, the denuded neon playgrounds of merchandising America. It is the ghost town of the Penthouse pleasure seekers stinking with the excrements of honky-tonk commercialism. The King of Marvin Gardens, written by Jacob Brackman and directed by Bob Rafelson, tortures Atlantic City's dying glory into a monopoly game of cultural dimensions, the bankrupt dead-end of the American dream...
...Rafelson peoples his landscape with the misfit fringes of go-ahead America: wheeler-dealers and sham artists, gamblers, petty crooks and rootless wanderers. Though outsiders, they still cherish a belief in Monopoly's promise, winner takes the jackpot. So they circle the board in a frivolous game of one-upmanship, until life sputters out in disillusionment or disaster...
...Rafelson's hero is David Staebler (Jack Nicholson), a late night radio monologuist who broadcasts private traumas packaged for cultural consumption. He leaves the sordid bachelor digs he shares with his grandfather in Philadelphia when summoned to Atlantic City by his brother Jason's telegram, "Get your ass down here. The Kingdom is come." The "Kingdom" turns out to be but a revived version of a boyhood fantasy: to take over Tiki island, one of the Hawaiian archipelago, build a casino and amass a fast fortune. The Staebler brothers spend the rest of the film trying to subsidize the dream...
...brothers has been killed, and the other trudges home where the grandfather is screening old home movies showing the two brothers on the beach long before when their sandcastles were more safely made of genuinesand and yet I was emotionally distracted because I was too aware that Rafelson was bring self-consciously cool...(100 more words...
...analyses Bob Rafelson's style, pulling out on route some of his favorite baseball cards--Fellini, Bergman, Antonioni, Truffaut, Godard, Hitchcock, Ford, Welles, Walsh, Nichols, Mazursky, Grosbard--all in one short and easy review. Past the intro, there's no more social consciousness. It is pretty nervy for Sarris to condemn "disconnection with the Other" midway through as a misinterpretation of auteurism's roots. At that point he's already lost three quarters of his non-acolyte audience...