Word: usual
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Unfortunately, the fun comes to a screeching halt when Gideon re-enacts Fosse's heart attack. Though it is daring for a film maker to dramatize his own brush with death, Fosse does not so much confront his own mortality as trivialize it. His usual grab bag of show-biz metaphors is not equal to the dramatic tasks at hand. Indeed, some of Fosse's conceits are embarrassing. An angel of death (Jessica Lange) trots in and out to recite banal Freudian explanations of Gideon's workaholism and promiscuous sexuality. Ben Vereen and dancers in cardiovascular body...
...work of art without its "value"-which means simply price, real or hypothetical-intruding on their reflections. After Velazquez's Juan de Pareja was bought at auction for New York's Metropolitan Museum for $5.5 million in 1970, the then director of the Met insisted, in his usual peppy, overbearing fashion, that the fuss about the price was all nonsense: in ten years' time nobody would care or even remember what the Met had laid out for this "supreme masterpiece...
...taller than she was at the Montreal Olympics, when she scored her seven perfect "tens" and won four gold medals, Nadia came to Fort Worth determined to prove that little girls can grow up and still be winners. In the first day of compulsory exercises, she ran off her usual daunting string of performances. Then an infection flared in her left hand and she was forced to enter a local hospital for treatment. When she emerged the next day, her hand was red and swollen to nearly twice its normal size. Despite obvious pain, she competed in one more event...
...huge cast almost immobilizes the movie. It takes too long to establish who everyone is and to knit all the plot strands together. Even though the film is relentlessly busy - there seems to be a physical gag in every shot - it has little of the director's usual narrative drive. The movie's story does not so much move forward as gradually selfdestruct. At times 1941 drags to a com- plete and stultifying halt: a lengthy dancehall brawl, conceived along the lines of a massive Laurel and Hardy pie fight, somehow comes out both mirthless and meanspirited...
...called on President Johnson to withdraw all troops from Viet Nam. But when he tried to sell a church and give the money to the poor without consulting the parishioners, he was forced to reverse himself, and soon asked to leave Rochester, a year before the usual retirment...