Word: vileness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nasty wit of his best known work, The Threepenny Opera. Unfortunely, Opera collaborator Kurt Weill was long gone when Brecht wrote this play, so director Serban commissioned hip New York composer Elizabath Swados to score Brecht's songs. Some of her past work like Runaways, has been pretty vile, but in Good Woman some of her curt, antimelodic songs are pretty fair substitutes for Weill. This is less laziness on Swados's part, I think, than the fact that Weill's music was the perfect accompaniment to Brecht's cynical, plebian lyrics...
...Orleans they have a mechanism called Bourbon Street, designed to accomplish this separation with maximum efficiency. Tourists seethe up and down bourbon Street like muddy water in a bayou, clutching takeaway mint juleps and Hurricanes (a vile and overpriced cocktail sold only to tourists) in big paper cups. Fast talking slicks in white tuxedoes, looking like Elvis Presley's manager admitting Priscilla's age at a press conference, wait outside strip joints, holding the doors open for tantalizing glimpses of the flesh within On the sidewalks young entrepreneurs hawk shoeshines, "SHIT HAPPENS-on Bourbon St." sweatshirts, voodoo masks, even chances...
...taught us that it is at precisely such moments that history sets up an importunate clamor on our doorsteps, demanding its due. This is quite literally true in the case of the Steenwijks, for the Resistance has chosen their quiet street as the perfect place to assassinate a particularly vile Nazi collaborator. He is hit in front of a neighboring house, but its inhabitants drag his corpse next door so that the reprisals, which everyone knows will be swift and terrible, will be directed at the Steenwijks...
...libretto. In Otello, however, flashbacks to the Moor's slave childhood are maudlin, and Zeffirelli's camera, jumping edgily from storm to massed choruses to brawls and bedrooms, tires the mind. As Otello, Tenor Placido Domingo is in robust voice, and Bass Justino Diaz makes a splendidly vile Iago. Yet Zeffirelli's presumption in heavily editing Verdi's taut masterpiece serves neither movie audiences nor opera lovers well, and the patina of homoeroticism that suffuses the film contradicts the heterosexual spirit of both libretto and score. No wonder he cut Desdemona's big number...
...Queen and proclaims with detached conviction, "It's a strange world." Isabella Rossellini is all lips and eyes as the tortured chanteuse. "Hit me, hit me," that S&M cliche, has resonance and poignancy in the context of her performance. Dennis Hopper is to-the-core nasty as the vile drug-killer; he was better in Apocalypse, Now, but it's hard to imagine any actor carrying this role off as well, or with more energy. Brad Dourif, babbling Billy Bibbit of Cuckoo's Nest fame, has a cameo, looking like John Cougar on acid. And Dean Stockwell lipsyncs...