Word: surrealness
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...still remembered as an incredible, nearly surreal trial. Defendants shouted "pig" and "fascist" at the judge, mocked him by wearing judicial robes. One day they tried to hold a birthday party, and when the cake was banned from court, one defendant cried out: "They've arrested your cake!" At one point a defense attorney threw himself across a table and tearfully implored the judge: "Put me in jail, for God's sake, and get me out of this place." As for the judge, he addressed the defendants with irony and invective. Besides being almost unbelievably chaotic, the trial...
...Exterminating Angel, Luis Bunuel, master of perverse magic and weaver of surreal spells, conjured up a dinner party that no one could leave. The guests were prisoners, not of the hosts or even of the house itself, but of each other, trapped by their own free will-victims, finally, of their own fantasies. It was a furious, scalding film, one of Bunuel's darkest and most unsparing...
...give the film makers a break - which is more than they give the viewer - Prime Cut was obviously intended to be a tough, surreal gangster film in the Point Blank mold, a kind of jazzy allegory about brutality and dehumanization. Point Blank, however, had John Boorman directing Lee Marvin. Prime Cut has only Lee Marvin and a director who must have taken a very long lunch hour. Against all odds, Marvin summons up a measure of dignity. Hackman looks abashed...
There are other weak links in Mills's tale, most notably Det. Butler. She is a gorgeous, ambitious and tough female cop who is just too surreal in her myriad attributes. Also, Mills employs an inter-Departmental report on the Lockley case as the vehicle for his story. He includes office memos, tapes interviews by the internal security office, and other "obtained" narratives such as a magazine article on Butler that never saw print. But despite his care in sticking to the format of a report, Mills slips into a trap posed by his own tight prose: no transcripts ever...
...Grant as Sophie Portnoy, the carnivorous Jewish mother, and Jack Somack as the resentfully respectable father can do no more than gesticulate their way through the clichés of Jewish parenthood. Surreal projections in Portnoy's mind, Sophie and Jack were never meant to be seen...