Word: superstardom
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...movie is fast, canny, tough-minded about the blandishments and attendant sacrifices of superstardom. Director Michael Apted and Scenarist Ray Connolly (who also wrote That'll Be the Day) are most adept at getting across the quality of quick chaos that attends this kind of celebrity, and they excel at making both lucid and scary the business dealings of an unwary superstar...
...movie has yet shown quite so cunningly or colorfully as Stardust all the internal battles of superstardom. If it dealt as strongly with the personal struggles, it would be even better. But this is a film that captures surfaces: the high-charged energy of a concert, the languor and uncertainty that comes with getting it all before you have wanted it long or hard enough. MacLaine is a familiar character, and the film makers are careful to make him selfish and artistically ambitious beyond his true abil ity. The movie's funniest sequence is MacLaine's masterwork...
...onetime top cop who has just done time for killing his cheating wife and has taken this job only because it is the closest thing to police work the parole board will allow. Portrayed by Burt Lancaster -who is turning into an attractive, hard-working actor as superstardom fades-he is a functionary trying to suppress his old hunter's instincts in order to keep his job security intact...
LOOK AT the album cover. Hard core normalcy at its best. Kids and wives, dogs and roadies, one big happy family. Southerners wear their superstardom well. None of your dissipated entourages, nine inch platforms, catered backstage parties, washed out groupies. Nossir. These are jus' folks. Who'd know that these very same Allman Brothers helped draw 600,000 hippies to a race track for a weekend of myth recreation? Or think it odd that the band hadn't achieved said superstardom until two members, one an original brother, had met violent deaths in similar circumstances, at locations within blocks...
James Taylor. Baby James has come quite a ways since that night at Sanders. Superstardom, its problems, liasons with Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon, marriage, life of the West Coast, building a house on Martha's Vineyard, even a couple albums. It may be the flat Appalachian twang, or the dryness of his wit, but I think James Taylor sings his life better than Neil Young sings his. What it really is, is that he approaches, but never reaches, the bounds of insipidity...