Word: yarning
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Homebodies is plotted out and done up with competence, so it does not look like the usual sleazy horror flick. For a yarn like this to work at all, though, the elfin imagination of a John Collier or Roald Dahl is indispensable. The authors and director of Homebodies have no such...
...mechanical objects, not actors, are the real farceurs. He mounts elaborate scenes of amuck earthmovers and bizarre automobile chases along the L.A. freeway. But these devices quickly give way to the intractable mechanics of the plot-plan, get the money and split. If a novel approach to such a yarn exists, this exercise is not it. &183; Jay Cocks
Marvin Gardens, however, was a movie that asked audiences to reach out almost as far as Nicholson, and it flopped. Chinatown, a smooth, period private-eye yarn that works hard to hark back to the '30s and '40s, comes much more easily to hand. In it, Nicholson makes a shrewd choice to play persona rather than character-a commodity hi rather short supply in the script. His JJ. Gittes is cool, ironic, sympathetically small-time, a guy who stumbles on something a little bigger than he expected, or can manage. He also gets the chance to smile...
When parts of Colson's yarn were published last week, no one was more interested than Senator Howard Baker, vice chairman of the Watergate committee. Suspecting a CIA link to Watergate, Baker had written a 35-page, unpublished report on the subject with some help from Colson. But Baker aides claim that there is nothing in the report to substantiate Colson's charge that the agency had a role in planning or executing the Watergate breakin, much less in plotting against the President...
...Outfit is the sort of yarn (ex-con goes up against the Mob biggies for revenge) that needs to have every moment blasted by visual invention. Director Flynn makes a movie that has been seen before, without either the skill or spirit that distinguished such excellent predecessors as Point Blank and Get Carter...