Word: vagrant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Three vagrant takes on the same tale: this isn't Rashomon, it's Trashomon. NBC, first with the most, painted Fisher's version in bold strokes, with no whitewash, and Noelle Parker was a fine Amy. ABC had the hottest sex, courtesy of a sulky, smoldering Drew Barrymore. Poor CBS had to hatch a Fatal Attraction plot without the sex, since Joey has never admitted to doing anything interesting. But the real subject of the Amy-thon was the Long Island accent and attitude -- Brooklyn with flashier threads. Try this at school, kids: "Din I awrea'y tell...
Much is made of Basquiat's use of sources -- vagrant code-symbols, quotes from Leonardo or African bushman art or Egyptian murals. But these are so scattered, so lacking in plastic force or conceptual interest, that they seem merely the result of browsing and doodling rather than looking -- homeless representation. For polemical purposes, any rough sketch of a cartoon African carrying a crate next to a white with a topee and a gun can be turned into a "devastating" indictment of colonialism -- but this doesn't make Basquiat into an artist with an articulate social vision. As for his poetic...
Anyway, it stinks of calculation. The film -- about a Reno singer (Whoopi Goldberg) finding refuge from her gangster lover (Harvey Keitel) in a dilapidated convent run by staid Maggie Smith -- allows no room for irony, vagrant inspiration or air. There's something piquant about the look of Whoopi in a wimple, but the star must soar or sink with the vehicle, and this one is a bathysphere. Despite a nice turn by Kathy Najimy as a criminally chirpy nun and some inventive charts by ace arranger Marc Shaiman, Sister Act has corporate fingerprints smudging its smiling face...
...vaunted U.S. independent director now aspires to make shorts. Mystery Train (1989) was three anecdotes in search of narrative baling wire. His new Night on Earth splits its time five ways: taxi drivers pick up fares in Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Rome, Helsinki. A little biography, a vagrant communion through the rearview mirror, then on to the next town. If Jarmusch keeps at it, he will become the first postpunk director of 30-second commercials...
Unsurprisingly, Berger idolizes Walt Whitman, another writer-lover, for beginning the democratization of art. When art rejects elitism, it "achieves...a spontaneous continuity with all of mankind. It is not an art of the princes or of the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant." In this spirit, Berger spins his own stories...