Word: 70s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...biopic about the screenwriting duo would probably fade in with obligatory teenage scenes of skinny Scott growing up in Los Angeles and larger Larry in South Bend, Ind., both obsessively making Super-8mm movies. Cut to the late '70s, when these film geeks become roommates at the University of Southern California after discovering a mutual love for trashy horror flicks like Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs. Now jump-cut to 1990, when they sell an original comedy about a bad seed called Problem Child but become dejected by the unfunny film that is made. To cheer themselves...
...comedian. But he was, perhaps, a mordant self-satirist, perpetually in touch with, loving and loathing, his inner child, the lonely little Long Island boy, consoled by his obsessive interest in the trashiest manifestations of pop culture. It was his luck to come on the scene in the '70s, just as a generation that had been shaped--blighted--by the same pop materials was arriving at self-consciousness. The natural impulse of the members of that generation was to nostalgize pop culture and their own innocent response to it. On the other hand, it was hard not to feel betrayed...
...have to admit that in the last third of the century, modernism ran out of steam intellectually even as it gathered near dictatorial cultural power. Take the art world, for example: allied with the museums, the mass media and the marketplace, it began to wield, as early as the '70s, in Hilton Kramer's words, "a pervasive and often cynical authority over the very public it affects to despise." We live now in an age of empty "Sensation" (to borrow the title of the recent Brooklyn Museum of Art show) and debate not the subtleties of high craftsmanship...
...stop. Four people are standing around a white, early-'70s Volvo. They're out of gas; can we help? Yes, yes, we say, of course. They want to siphon from our tank. They have an actual siphon right there. We don't have enough, we say, noticing that we're almost out ourselves. We'll take them to the next town. Another man, Esteban, about 19, gets in the back seat, as does Marisa, 24, petite, in silk blouse and black jeans. They hold the gas container on their laps. It's 15 minutes to tiny-town Roda...
...striving, convoluted movie, which never quite becomes the smoothly reciprocating engine Anderson (who did Boogie Nights) would like it to be. Indeed, only one of his tales is fully persuasive. That's the one about the Partridge family, which is not to be confused with the nice folks from '70s TV. The patriarch, Earl (Robards), is dying of cancer, a metaphor for decay that Anderson likes too much. Earl's trophy wife (Moore), who married him for his money, has decided she actually loves the old guy and is in a guilty frenzy to prove it. He, meantime, is desperate...