Word: rafelsons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...RAFELSON'S MONOPOLY METAPHOR is too slick a formula. He has poached inconsistently on the terrain Arthur Miller familiarized: Shopworn sales talk has become the idiom of a society based on manipulation, commercial go-getting has been universalized as a private ethic, preservation of personal integrity means self-destruction. These are his cool assumption, the truisms of one who has seen-it-all. Sentimentially is a demon to him, so he lavishes heavy filmic methods in an effort to play it tough, and it is wholly at the expense of his material. He has twisted the form of his film...
WHAT IS CRIMINAL about this sort of self-centered expertise is that it usurps the film's only potential interest, its triangular network of human relationships. Rafelson splurges on suggestiveness and bankrupts the meaning of his suggestion. Sally's menopausal trauma is supposed to be a simmer that slowly comes to boil in manic proportions. But Rafelson dissects it into a series of chic vignettes; she throws a tantrum over rusty bathwater, is glimpsed through a bedroom door, naked, giddily squirting a watergun at a cowboy costumed Jessica. Tear-streaked, she burns her beauty aids with funereal ceremony, mourns...