Word: vonnegutians
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...eccentricities, Timequake adheres to at least one Vonnegutian standby: make 'em laugh while you're showing them their Armageddon. It's not exactly a spoonful of sugar, but it does help the medicine go down...
Nevertheless the idea of taking care of the author as a relative is surprisingly attractive. It is, in fact, a rather Vonnegutian idea. One of the fragments collected here proposes a sensibly loony scheme by which everyone in the country would get a new middle name and a lot of new relatives chosen arbitrarily by computer. The names would be words like Daffodil, Chromium, and so on, and they would signify clans. Each Daffodil would have 19,999 fellow clansmen spread out around the U.S. to be treated as relatives: to be cared for, cursed, feuded with, borrowed from, nursed...
Though the Vonnegutian prose is lost, it's not really missed. The slickly manipulated surface is compensated by accomplished achievements in all technical departments. Hill has hired the best in the business--editor Dede Allen, photographer Miroslav Ondricek, musician Glenn Gould, and they all do as well as can be done with craft that lacks original inspiration. And the simplification of the story, and its screen enactment by a talented ensemble, result in as hard-driving a simple-minded pacifist's statement as the novel...
...individuality, all the special human art and love which went into the building of the city have been irrevocably destroyed by what seem like uncontrollable modern forces. Hill is no Ruskin, but his appreciation for medieval images not only is sincere, but makes the Vonnegutian world view even darker. America has always relied more directly than other Western countries on raw nature for its lifeways and philosophies. With our resulting flexibility and vigor, says this film, we've helped kill the Old World order of things. And back home we're starting to pollute our own land as well, with...
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