Word: schrader
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MOST BAD MOVIES have some redeeming virtues--an ambitious idea, a suspenseful moment, some good acting, a little imaginative direction. Hardcore, however, is only interesting as evidence director Paul Schrader's professional sellout. As he plods through a made-for-TV-story, Schrader shows no inclination to communicate anything but his boredom...
...story of a Grand Rapids businessman tracking down his missing daughter in the 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...
...movie begins and ends in a pious condemnation of street life from a traditional, middle-class, Midwestern, Protestant perspective--a perspective which seems as foreign to Schrader as California is to Scott's bewildered father. Schrader's prototypes of middle class life, Grand Rapids, is nothing but a collection of hokey cliches. In the first five minutes, we see sledding kids, skating kids, kids watching TV, kids delivering the newspaper, daddies shoveling the sidewalk, mommy driving the car. Then comes religion--the snowy church, icons on the wall, grace before dinner, and discussions of sin among the men. The images...
...feelings of on-the-job anomie and alienation that show themselves in absenteeism, alcoholism and other unpleasantries. We have heard that they feel simultaneously exploited (by both their employers and their unions) and ignored (by the rest of society). But such matters are not much discussed in movies. Paul Schrader, previously best known as the writer of Taxi Driver, which dealt with another sort of disfranchisement, deserves high marks for originality as prime mover, director and co-writer of this new project...
...director, Schrader is lucky to have three strong men for his leading roles. Kotto, in particular, gives depth and an odd, worldly-wise dignity to his role as a man who is not as smart as he thinks he is, though in some ways is much wiser than he admits even to himself. None of them, though, gets as much help from Schrader as they could use. He has trouble finding the heart of a scene, trouble keeping the overall tone and tension of his film consistent. There is a power in this story he simply does not realize. Even...