Word: socko
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...film's comic tone, however, is as deadpan as that of a New Yorker profile. The interested-disinterested camera follows its subject for a few days, records snippets of conversation, refuses to strain for socko punch lines or an apocalyptic climax. As an ironic True Confessions, the film may satisfy the benign curiosity millions of people seem to have about Woody Allen. The star of cover stories in virtually every major magazine has now written and directed his own. It is the story of his life and his films, a defense of a public artist's need...
...There are reasonable suspense and good comic effect as the three nice women stumblingly rehearse, plan and execute the robbery. The strategy is to attack while witnesses are distracted by a goofy historical pageant about Oregon, where - refreshingly - the film was shot. The high point of that history, the socko ending toward which the pageant builds, is - could it be otherwise? - a Rose Bowl victory by the local football team...
...only understood what needed to be done but had the strength, the self-discipline and the resolve to see it through." The crowd interrupted a number of times with applause and ended with a standing ovation. By any standard, Maggie Thatcher's debut in the U.S. was a socko performance...
This uneasiness is a common response to films Paul Schrader (Blue Collar, Hardcore) has a hand in. They always begin as intriguing notions, but Schrader is willing to sell out themes, characterization, simple dramatic logic in order to serve up a socko scene or a happy ending. One guesses that here the producer and co-writer started out to make a trendy feminist tract about taking just revenge on male inadequacy, then found that Diane desperately needed humanization. Star and director obliged, but the result is an incoherent mess...
...good convention, like a good novel, has rising and falling action and a socko conclusion that leaves customers eager to return next time. The International Fiscal Association spent $20,000 to hire Soprano Leontyne Price, Conductor Arthur Fiedler and the National Symphony Orchestra for the final evening's entertainment. The Hyatt Hotels Corp. offers ten "theme packages" for the concluding blowout, including Monte Carlo night, rodeo parties, an Arabian Nights banquet and a Tom Jones party, in which the ballroom is filled with trees, grass, live pigs, chickens, llamas and a tame tiger, while guests gnaw on turkey drumsticks...