Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Playwright Luis Valdez has tried to shape this tale as a mixture of myth, documentation and fantasy, but he never gets past the ABCs in any category. Edward James Olmos is electrifying as the embodiment of the mythic hero known as El Pachuco, but the script short-circuits him, and he is reduced to cynic snarls and stylized struts. Daniel Valdez is winning as a gang leader with unstained valor. He is stalemated in a TV-style love triangle between his loyal Chicano girlfriend (Rose Portillo) and a Jewish minority-rights defender (Karen Hensel) of inflammable zeal...
...from something filmed on location in Hoboken. It could have been a lot worse (one love scene in a purplish rainstorm demonstrated a potential for sappy disaster), and a writer without a Horatio Alger complex could have made the movie better. "We walked in a fine line" between fairy tale and fact, remarks Irving. As Karl Wallenda would say, if he could, that can be dangerous...
...JOHNNY ROTTEN brought a new faith along with his vaseline-and-tale pomaded hair, a faith in rock and roll and its ability to survive its own history, a cocksure answer to the "Now what?" he mutters once between tracks on this wonderful new album. The answer consisted of a return to three-chord rock and roll and a reworking of old standards in an energetic new style. Their originality relied on performance, not form; rock and roll has always been wrapped up in personality and attitude, and the contumacious stance and demonic vigor the Sex Pistols brought to rock...
...named Gus Howkins falls in love with Julia, a distressed young actress fleeing from her famous actor husband. There are more than emotional and thematic parallels between Giles and Dinah and Gus and Julia. Their stories literally leap-frog each other in alternating chapters throughout The Pardoner's Tale...
...notion of art as roof gutter is nicely suited to Wain's thoughtful treatment of two middle-aged men joyfully making fools of themselves over younger women. In less knowing hands, The Pardoner's Tale might have been only a clever sex reversal on the stock English romance about a maiden schoolteacher's brief tryst in Italy. But instead of sentimentality, Wain offers genuine sentiments. Instead of passion enveloping quivering loins in petals of fire, there is a steady sensuous glow that warms the brain...