Word: zed
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Piper's protagonist, Zedekiah Maine (Geoff Gladstone), is a high school English teacher with a great deal of bad luck. While walking to the apartment of his girlfriend Angela (Sara Smith), Zed is mugged by Ernest Bugger (Mike McGraw), who takes his wallet, money, overcoat and the flowers he was going to give Angela. Ernest is immediately arrested, but the process Zed goes through between the arrest and the actual trial is a trial in and of itself for Zed. The police harass him, he is mistaken for a transvestite and his students harangue him. Everything culminates in the final...
Gladstone plays Zed with Woody Allen's-not Kafka's-angst, complaining and sarcastically barbing his detractors. Sometimes Zed's commentary is a little too clever to be seem spur of the moment as sarcastic barbs should, but the lines are funny nonetheless and Gladstone effectively conveys Zed's frustration at being in center of such a farce...
Henry, filmed documentary-style, gets its power from no-frills naturalism. The Cook, by contrast, is all artifice: splendid, meticulous, extravagant. One expects no less from the British writer-director Peter Greenaway, who with The Draughtsman's Contract and A Zed and Two Noughts revealed his gifts as a creator of murals on the subject of ruthless gamesmanship. His stories are hot, his style cool. His new film is the tale of a vicious crook (Michael Gambon) who dines nightly at a posh restaurant with his gang and his luscious, abused wife (Helen Mirren). Her pleasures are furtive but sweet...
...wasn't so pretentious and disgusting, Zed could almost be a parody of dialectic, throwing up (not an idly chosen phrase) contrasts and parallels that intertwine to infinite degrees. Instead, it is a celebration of decay and death...
...this perverted movie would be to dignify it to a degree it doesn't deserve. It's hard to imagine anyone enjoying this journey through decay, or to understand how the experience of watching an intellectualized version of Faces of Death could lead to anything but nausea. A Zed and Two Noughts is an angry, pointless film nothing more than stupidity masquerading as profundity...