Word: statics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...show fails before it molds Perry Mason and his colleagues into forgettable characters. The Mason created in 1933 by Erle Stanley Gardner was a volatile, often unscrupulous lawyer-sleuth. Raymond Burr toned the man down, but added a dynamism of his own which made Mason the sort of fascinating static character best suited to an hour-long TV show. Monte Markham, though somewhat better in the second episode than in the first, appears to have whittled Mason down further without adding anything...
...slightly anxious self-deceptions that Dreyfuss's contemporaries will soon be using. Dreyfuss climbs aboard his plane for college still carrying a radio tuned to the favorite local station. The radio plays until he is in the air and finally out of range, and the crackle of static is his first intimation-though he does not know it-of freedom...
...EARLY '60s, the dramatic plot-line suffered a decline as such "slice-of-life" films as Room at the Top and The Misfits grew in popularity. In these movies there was no real development either of story or character, only static episodes describing the nature of characters' lives. In the late '60s, when the gangster film returned, heralded by Bonnie and Clyde, it was afflicted with this same absence of drama (and therefore, lack of audience involvement). Instead of stories of gangsters' lives, the films continued in the vein of the slice-of-life drama. They became superficial chronicles illustrating...
...gangster movies of the thirties and forties didn't need Technicolor bloodbaths to draw audiences. They were thrilling melodramas, gripping in their own right. In Dillinger, all we see are static moments in time without a sense of cause-and-effect. The bloody episodes are strung together with little continuity, merely reaffirming the adage that crime doesn't pay. Life is continually lost to no avail. The gangsters never even seem to have a chance to spend their money. How can we glorify Dillinger? He seems no more than a crook...
...what is left of that old reality or in a scrubbed-up version of a turn-of-the-century world that feeds the nation's nostalgia for what it fondly-if erroneously-believes were simpler, better times. Setting aside the animated features, the typical Disney movie today is static, overreliant on low-grade verbal humor and ill-conceived comic situations-cars and chimpanzees that are almost human, which is more than you can say for the people who appear in support of them...