Word: ragingly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...flailingly dumb, and one is provokingly prissy. McLure writes with his fist, and his characters punch out at adamant walls. Pvt. Wars takes place in a mental ward for brain-bruised war veterans. In a series of blackout scenes, Richard Bowne, Leo Burmester and Daniel Ziskie place banderillas of rage, revenge and practical jokery in each other's heads, but their heads are the arena from which they will never escape. In Lone Star, a Viet Nam veteran named Roy (Patrick Tovatt) longs to escape from a changed Texas and preserve the past of his youthful high jinks...
...with the identification of the black male as a helpless cripple, who stands idly by while his woman totes laundry and cleans kitchens to feed his children; she gets raped or seduced by the white man, and generally perverts the normal family structure to encourage her dominance. Gradually his rage grows, he longs to assert his control over himself, his woman and his race; finally, he explodes. But when he does it is in terms of spontaneous and largely ineffect ive outbursts of rage that were directed inward and hurt the ghetto dweller most." Why? Because it was not equality...
...seamy world of pornography had potential both as a commercial success and as a moving and controversial screenplay, but Schrader fails to introduce the powerful emotional issues that could have accomplished either. Although George C. Scott as the father gives the audience some agonized faces and fits of rage, even his performance is not compelling. The fiction of the film fails to reveal why the daughter runs away, or why she would agree--in the astonishingly unconvincing last scene--to come home. Nor does it suggest how the father accepts what has happened to his daughter...
...dick played by Peter Boyle. Back in Grand Rapids Scott wanders around looking sad. Even religion isn't fun anymore. Finally Boyle shows up and coyly presents Scott with a low-rent porn flick starring his daughter. Scott reacts to the screening in predictable stages of disbelief, grief and rage. So where is the girl? Still missing...
Dern has his detractors--people who think he perpetually overacts. He might, but that's what makes him so interesting. Most comfortable in "psycho" roles, Dern's bulging eyes and thin, strangled voice convey inner torment and rage better than any film star today. He frequently suggest a cross between Anthony Perkins and Jack Nicholson--a homey, sardonic, seventies Norman Bates--and those quivering depths make his comparatively restrained performances in The Great Gatsby and Smile teeter devastatingly on the brink of an explosion. But in his all-out roles--in Silent Running, Black Sunday, Coming Home-- Dern makes...