Word: useless
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...words be useless? They get us through the day. What else could so regularly entice...
...could start anywhere; let's start concretely. The hero is a landlord still living off rents; he does not work. He keeps a huge modern apartment full of luxury items which obsess him more than they divert him. He is imprisoned by conspicuously useless memory-laden objects-his wife's dresses, his own collection of sculpture and painting, the very size of his rooms. These keep him from understanding his life: they keep him thinking about surplus value subjectively and purely in itself, as Scott Fitzgerald might have said in a drunken Marxist moment...
...trial for rape. Alea presents the whole situation through his eyes-along with his voiceover judgments of the poor people accusing him, judgments from a highly bigoted upper-class perspective. The hero's generalizations about national character, his sense of the country, the Cuban soul, his generally useless impressions of social events, all run through the film and stand as a description of Cuba which the film nowhere objectively opposes. His oppressive sense of the alien city with its crowds, characteristic of the most hackneyed modern Western fiction, stands unchallenged as a description of Havana under socialism. Progressive film-makers...
Their entire life they wield the broom to muddle up useless things...
...decades later, with a change in architectural belief. Obsessed with the idea that everything in G and S has to be funny, they have transformed a soprano showpiece into a mindless burlesque. Barbara Menaker, as Mabel, goes along with the gag, and gives an adequate but useless performance...