Word: subplots
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...imitations of greats like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Sweet Mama Stringbean, who made their early fame on the circuit. The setting is New Orleans' Lyric Theater. A backstage dressing-room drama, replete with the trials and tribulations of show biz and some seething personal rivalries, constitutes the subplot picture frame for the evening...
...biographies of Christ, as in Nicholas Ray's 1961 remake of Cecil B. DeMille's silent epic King of Kings and George Stevens' overwrought 1965 The Greatest Story Ever Told. In this new film, there is no digression into the sexual enticements of Salome, no subplot on Barabbas, and no theorizing about the motives of Judas as in Franco Zeffirelli's TV Jesus of Nazareth. On the other hand, there is almost no character development, although Brian Deacon, an English actor, manages to portray a Christ who is much less mystical and more appealing than most...
...rises only to the level of TV's now defunct Animal House sitcoms. Through it all, Murray smiles and forges ahead, but his big riffs have been edited down to frantic bursts of mugging. Even worse is the single attempt to capitalize on his personal warmth: an interminable subplot about the friendship between Murray and a shy camper (Chris Makepeace) is so mawkishly presented that it takes on an unintended air of homosexual romance. As Murray himself might put it on Saturday Night Live, Meatballs is the work of knuckleheads...
...post-production, or perhaps Hiller just got bored with his own creation. In either case, his lack of respect for his audience shows up in the form of plot inconsistencies and editing flubs. Most glaringly, he spends about 15 minutes of the early part of the film building a subplot about Arkin's wife and her discovery of her husband's entanglement with Falk, and then drops it without a blink. This is not the stuff of entertaining movies, let alone good ones, and Hiller was lucky he had an actor as talented as Falk to save his film...
...slaves, Roots 11 is able to dramatize normal black middle-class life - at home, work, college and war. For TV viewers weaned on The Jeffersons, their lives may come as a revelation. Roots 11 shows blacks sharing the same heart breaks, career ambitions and class conflicts as whites. A subplot about a Rus sian Jewish merchant (George Voskovec) in the South also sets up parallels between blacks and foreign immigrants as both groups deal with the problem of assimilation into American culture. But Roots 11 does not try to turn blacks into dark-skinned whites. When Haley's forebears...