Word: soundtracks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...camera angles, obstructed views-particularly of conversing pairs-and the division of the work into three tableaux all serve, among other things, to keep us conscious of our voyeur status. The characters themselves tease our distance from the film. "What's that music?" one will ask referring to the soundtrack after a particularly absorbing drama. Finally the improbable conclusion, and one of the film's few hackneyed moments: an elegant string ensemble in an alley-the soundtrack's players taking a bow? -stirs memories of similar Fellini incongruities, satirized here by the moment's harshness...
...deeper style improves so much on the "old Joe Jackson" that his one left over from those days, "Pretty Boys," (also available on the Times Square soundtrack) falls flat. Even the theme is hackneyed: beautiful people succeed, uglies don't. He follows "Pretty Boys" with "Fit", a far superior attack on society's selectivity. In "Fit," he defends transsexuals and mulattos as examples of the individuals that 'free' society stigmatizes, and reassures the average citizen...
...stirring drumroll rises on the soundtrack, Judy Benjamin heads down a long tree-lined road, alone. She seems to have made a definite decision, but what is it? Where will she go? Back to the Army? For all her superficial self-confidence, she's the same directionless ninny she was at the beginning of the movie...
...this Dutch version of Saturday Night Fever would have to cross many cultural barriers to be accessible to American youth. Riding motorbikes with glee, munching french fries and mustard, and wrangling with Calvinist consciences, the Spetters (translated Aces) are rebellious youth who "live like there's no tomorrow." The soundtrack consists of second-rate juke box numbers from the Johnny Rotten timevault, but it is probably the flaunted flesh in Spetters which has made it a box office success. There are masturbations, erections, girl-swappings, older women, and a penis-measuring contest, all apparently dear to international punks...
Debbie Harry's performance is an analogue for the psychological violence of the cold war days, all pouty and conformist. She invests her love in new shoes and a blonde bleach job. The soundtrack is credited to Chris Stein, the other Blondie personage, but his electronic accompaniment resembles a melodramatic mix of Robert Fripp and Bernard Herrmann, not the band's dance beat...