Rene Bard’s Reviews > Reeling > Status Update

p462 "Cabaret found a solution to the happy-equals-square problem: it worked on electricity and wit, which made us [the cool people] happy."

p462 "Cabaret is about living in the moment, Weimar being a
metaphor for a futureless society."

p454 "Lemmon, who isn't Jewish, plays Jews who aren't Jewish, either.
He's cast as a Jew for the same reason Montgomery Clift was after the
accident that disfigured him - because the look in his face passes for
pain. It is pain, but it's the wrong kind - suggesting a mixture of dissipation,
grogginess, gutlessness."

p428 "And maybe because he [the director Richards] looks to see what's in people's faces he brought something out of Alan Arkin, instead of letting Arkin put it there."

p365 "...there's a fagged out joke about Nixon, and later an angry blast at the media to balance it."
[Kael comments on the film "Airport 1975"]

p262"...I certainly don't mean to suggest that we should have clung to our myths of American heroism, or to that worst myth of all - the self-righteous union of strength and virtue..."

VS

p262"...a lost innocence, a lost paradise of guiltlessness."

p214"Costa-Gavras...has a respect for those consciously caught in political dilemmas, even if they're middle-class..."

p225"The Walton's is set in the thirties and features a family of Waspy plaster saints presided over by a mothering bucket of slop..."

p252"The John Wayne figure - the man who stood for the right (in both
senses, I fear...)"

p143 "...we hadn't cared for her; now her humiliation illuminates what was going on in her while we were dismissing her for her middle-classness..."

PK spoke for the American Left in Jan 1973 when she wrote(p105): "Probably what comes through in political life in the Soviet Union is what comes through in political life here now – hopelessness, apathy, suspicion, fear, cynicism, violence."

Implied was that Leftist ideals in the USSR would one day prevail.

A decade later, Democratic leaders like Ted K would be running back-channel foreign policy with the USSR.

p41"[Bunuel] was diabolically antibourgeois, and he wasn't just anticlerical - he was hilariously, murderously anticlerical...a deep pleasure to see that the unregenerate anarchist-atheist has found his path to grace." (example of the typical shallow American Leftist - if B is so great, why not move to the USSR and make movies?)

p42"...food, that ritual center of bourgeois well-being..." (Marxists don't need food.)