Word: witnesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...career today, he would be writing his memoirs in Malibu and growing rich off Polaroid commercials. In Sartre's play, however, he is dodging creditors, juggling mistresses and in his spare moments asking himself that old existential question: Who am I? Sartre's answer, given with stylish wit, is that Kean is like all of life's actors, a mirage that exists only through the force of his own will. When that disappears, so does...
...therapy at the onset of middle age. Roth was 40 at the time. His reputation as a master of literary comedy had been firmly established by Portnoy's Complaint. My Life as a Man (1974) and The Professor of Desire (1977) returned to the sensitive roots of his wit: the conflicts between lust and respectability, art and burlesque, cultural ties and personal freedom, the problem of how to be-or not to be-a Jew. Civilization and its discontents were no longer a set of Freudian trampolines for a spry intelligence; the escape from solemnity required a more studied...
Curiously, British Playwright Tom Stoppard has used the same metaphor to make essentially the same point in his Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), a 70-minute theater piece for actors and orchestra. Stoppard enlivened his schematic political lesson with wit, and so, at times, does Fellini. In the film's first half, a visiting TV documentary team interviews the musicians and gets a lively response. A flutist turns a cartwheel. A drummer attacks the piano as a "chatterbox." An insomniac trumpeter confides that with his instrument, "a clinker is death." Once anarchy takes hold, however, the idiosyncratic individuals...
...LeBoutillier has to write about Harvard as a liberal/radical enclave, he could at least do it with virulence (a la Joe McCarthy's speech about "the Kremlin on the Charles") or with wit and style (a la William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale). Instead, he loads us down with sixth-grade platitudes and an embarassing series of distortions...
...like a duck and took a lot of drugs. There was his high school girlfriend, pretty and clinging after his every step; there was the guitar which he was struggling to play, and the home-made stereo which demolished thousands of records. He was an incongruous blend of toughness, wit, frustration, recklessness, friendliness and zeal. Lots of zeal, all of it poorly channelled. He wanted to be a rock and roll star, you see, but in the end he wound up being himself. Lovable, but dangerous...