Word: vulgarize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...daughter Faye (Karen Black) is the sort of teasing, intemperate beauty who slaughters men with a smile. Karen Black is a bothersome actress at best, strident and sloppy; she does not even have what acting schools call "the physical apparatus" to be sensual. Faye represents another hopeless dream whose vulgar impossibility is supposed to make her, like Hollywood itself, all the more seductive. She must be ruinously alluring; Black merely looks wrecked...
...that anyone is likely to be bored while the film is building up to this climactic vulgarity. Writer Wexler and Director Fleischer treat us to gaudy depictions of all the evils in the Old South that we have learned to know and loathe. We have scarcely settled into our seats before Falconhurst's Young Massah is venturing across the color line to find true sexual happiness. Floggings, hangings, slave auctions and gory combats follow in quick succession. There are sadistic assaults on prepubescent black girls and a good deal of bother about incest. James Mason, as the plantation...
Grip on Destiny. His Truman is spunky, combative, resilient, profanely funny, fundamentally honest, profoundly patriotic, and vulgar in the best sense: that is, of the earth, earthy. Amazingly, Whitmore captures the mystique of the presidency and the rock-hard reality of making final decisions. One actually does believe that this is the Truman who ordered the atomic bomb dropped, met with Stalin and Churchill as peers, initiated the Marshall Plan, and fired Douglas MacArthur. He reminds us almost too vividly of a time when both the individual and the country had a better grip on their destinies than they have...
This has always been Ken Russell's way, and now he's found the perfect vehicle. Russell is fascinated by Tchaikovsky--he made The Music Lovers about him--and a critic of the composer could level similar charges at the director--he is vulgar, sloppy, with a wild imagination that colors furiously outside the lines. Which is why an actor like Jack Nicholson (who plays the doctor)--an actor of understatement and double meaning--looks totally out of place in Tommy. And a brash swaggerer like Oliver Reed (Tommy's stepfather) is quite at home...
...Mathers--supposedly killed in Victnam, actually alive and working as a bank teller in California--wavers between pathos and satire, finally achieving neither. Most of the other songs are simply incoherent or pointless. Where Sold American was absurdly satirical or emotionally poignant this album is strained, inane, and often vulgar...