Word: surrealness
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...kind of microphone "panning" from one speaker to the other.) Harvard Square requires careful listening for an understanding of what's going on around, behind, and in the story-line. And for some of the episodes, what's going on isn't really worth the careful listening-the surreal qualities of the show's construction become less than real, or just dull...
...create a parable of the decay of capitalist consciousness. The hallucinating mind of Antonio comes to represent a political system deprived of coherence, left only to a bombast of images of its growth, crimes, guilts and fears. The plot is a contrivance to make feasible the various fantasies and surreal dramas that provide the core of Saura's parable, far more important than the narrative surface...
...Carter is a doggedly nasty piece of business made in blatant but inept imitation of Point Blank. While the violence in Point Blank defines some surreal and chilling points about the savagery of contemporary urban life, the mayhem in Get Carter is a gruesome and almost pornographic visual obsession. Fledgling DirectorMike Hodges clearly hoped to put together a jazzy paean to the classic detective story; the film's protagonist, in fact, is shown in a couple of scenes poring over a copy of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. But Hodges seems to have learned more from Mickey...
There are flaws in the film: vignettes featuring Lou Jacobi as a past-throttled immigrant judge, Donald Sutherland as the pastor of the First Existentialist Church, and Alan Arkin as a neurotic police chief are all ill-timed. The first is prolonged to an ineffectively surreal note, the second (by far the funniest) turns into roundhouse farce, the last starts and ends hysterically...
...unrelated to the distance of the image) alternating with a subjective and poetically rich interior monologue, objective long shots, all create the opposite effect: critical alienation. You aren't just barraged by stimuli, as with dialectical montage; you become part of a process, a total dialectic: political rationality vs, surreal conditions...