Word: tempo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...their films shall ye know them. Looking at any national cinema, a viewer inevitably sketches a personality profile of that country: its mood and tempo, its political priorities, its sense of humor (if any) and, above all, its attitudes toward sex and romance. Americans, to judge from the movies they make and attend, are fast, rough, raunchy lovers -- backseat studs and born- to-thrill prom queens. Canadians cannot decide whether to imitate American energy or British reserve. Germans are dogmatic and ironic by turns; and the men snore in bed, but only, as one of them explains, "to protect their...
...Berlin (pop. 2.1 million) is a city with insomnia. By day the streets hum as dark-suited businessmen brush impatiently past roller skaters clad in little more than G-strings, and camera-laden tourists gawk at punk couples in Dracula makeup and matching spiky hairdos. So fast is the tempo that when a quarrel erupted recently between two West Berliners, the story goes, one snapped at the other, "Slap yourself for me. I don't have time." At night the city grows more manic still, with revelers jamming its cabarets, dance halls and 23-hour-a-day pubs...
What is being said goes directly -- indeed, aggressively -- against the grain of contemporary flag waving. In 1984 the Del-Lords kicked off their first album, Frontier Days, with an up-tempo version of an old blues, How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live, which Kempner had discovered on a Ry Cooder recording. The new album opens on a note of embattled optimism with Heaven: "I need something that I can believe in/ And another person just won't do . . . I believe . . . that there's better days ahead/ I believe . . . there's a heaven before I'm dead...
Well, this season's big moneymaker appears to be a Motownesque ditty called "Sledgehammer" by erstwhile art-rocker Peter Gabriel. As summer swill singles go, "Sledge" is a real doozy, the slowed-down tempo perfect for dancing (or doing anything else) in a sand dune. Perhaps if "Sledge" was a Van Halen song, I could really get excited. But coming from Gabriel, one of few rock performers who writes intelligent and adult material, this song and most of So hit me about as hard as a three-day-old Miller Light...
...this is splendidly orchestrated in quickstep tempo. Aliens never forgets that its basic business is escapist, provided, of course, that your idea of escape is to give yourself over to a 2-hr. 17-min. movie that takes you up the ladder from apprehension to anxiety to fear to flat-out horror. Those big bugs are smart in their yucky way, and they are everywhere. Each time one of their human opponents opens a door or rounds a corner, you know terrible trouble is about to ensue. Anytime someone confidently announces what looks to be a foolproof plan to exterminate...