Word: suburbias
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pravda journalists, Washington-based Boris Strelnikov and his editorial colleague from Moscow. Igor Shatunovsky, who traveled coast to coast on a six-week automobile tour of the U.S. In an eleven-part series under the title "America on the Right and the Left," they applaud American hospitality, motels, suburbia, telephone orders at drive-in restaurants and skyscraper construction ("The building rises by the minute, not by the day or week"). There are touches of naivete: they believe, for example, that drive-in banks are conveniences only for businessmen. There's also plain misinformation (the series opens with Negro women...
What drove Mary to this sort of behavior is tritely hinted at: the boozy infidelities of suburbia, the shattering of some romantic girlhood dreams, the parade of horror every night on the late news. What is stressed, underscored and bludgeoned home is the general ugliness of married life. Brooks just cannot let it alone. Add to this a generous quota of misogyny (lots of beauty parlor closeups of fat thighs, wrinkled faces, and housewives struggling into girdles), and the result is a film as misguided and one-sided as the marriage it struggles to portray...