Word: reeling
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Capra's early life does sound like one of his scenarios. An immigrant Sicilian, one of seven kids, he has to take almost as many jobs as courses to get himself through school. His first movie work, directing a one-reel rendition of a Kipling poem, is a chance opportunity...
...film strikes a sometimes successful, sometimes tenuous balance between suspenseful diversion and romantic melodrama. Klute's character is never adequately probed, and there is an uncomfortable number of genre cliches, including a hoked-up terror-in-the-last-reel episode that lacks both terror and surprise. Worse, the sentimental fadeout runs completely contrary to the strenuously realistic tone the film has struggled to sustain...
...sales. The practice has long been a problem (Frank Sinatra records were bootlegged in the '40s), but technology has only recently made it attractive to young entrepreneurs. A variety of tape copiers, from $40 recorders to $100,000 stereo duplicating systems, can turn out cartridges, cassettes or reel-to-reel tapes, usually in less time than it takes to listen to them. Music-trade publications and underground newspapers carry ads for the machines, and many an Aquarian-Ager has been able to convert his basement into a tape factory. Nearly every city has record stores, gas stations and supermarkets...
...plot, Big Jake is something of a family affair. The supporting cast includes such old Wayne cronies as Bruce Cabot and Harry Carey Jr. Cinematographer William Clothier has worked with Wayne at least half a dozen times before, and Director George Sherman guided Wayne through a series of two-reel westerns back in the early '30s. The film's producer is the Duke's oldest son, Michael, 36, and the air of reunion is reinforced by the presence on-screen of two other sons, John Ethan, 8, who appears as Jake's grandson, and Patrick Wayne...
...movie makes several elaborate feints at symbolism, then quickly collapses under the weight of its petrified pretensions. Nicholson seems to be after a kind of existential melodrama: the basketball player frozen by his own spiritual malaise, with his roommate, the campus radical who goes mad in the last reel, representing the inevitable result of purposeful action in an insane world. But the film is too incoherent to sustain such interpretations. The action sways sloppily between the ballplayer and the radical, straddling an unwieldy subplot concerning the ballplayer's romance with a bitchy, nymphy faculty wife...