Word: cosmo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Negligence. That worthy sentiment seems to turn Davidson's prose to pulp. When her irony departs, she sounds as preposterous as Cosmo fantasy: "He was a full professor, and yet there was about him a spirit of hijinks." The women's sex lives - their entire lives, in fact - seem like nothing so much as an interminable game of pinball- careening from one man to another with an awful earnestness, a flashing of lights and banging of flippers. Susie, who solves her frigidity with a vibrator, decides eventually that having slept with more than 100 men, "it was probably...
...Save Your Own Life is written in six or seven different styles, ranging from academic hauteur (she says she was "amanuensis to the Zeitgeist") through Cosmo cute ("Bed reared its ugly headboard") to bewilderingly lifeless porn. The author's mind seems to have been softened by too many hours in a Malibu Jacuzzi. As if searching for a new definition of vulgarity, Jong writes that hostile criticism of her first novel makes her think of "Jews gassed at Auschwitz." (Actually, Fear of Flying was extravagantly overpraised.) She also contrives to turn the tragic suicide of Poet Anne Sexton (named...
...When Cosmo sets off for the hit, he has a blowout on the Hollywood Freeway. He phones a Yellow Cab to take him the rest of the way. Then, while waiting for transportation to arrive, he calls up the Crazy Horse to see how the show is going. He asks the bartender what number is on. The bartender does not know. "Is it the 'April in Paris' number?" Cosmo demands. The bartender still professes ignorance. Cosmo starts barking out hints: "Is Mr. Sophistication singing I Can't Give You Anything But Love? Look on the back wall...
What keeps The Killing of a Chinese Bookie from ranking with the best of Cassavetes' previous films (like Husbands) is that it remains simultaneously too obvious and indistinct. We know from the first that Cosmo is one of the walking wounded, so it is hardly necessary to make him into that-quite literally-at the movie's end. Further, the time Cassavetes spends in the Crazy Horse is amusing but aimless...
...always, the acting is superlative. Gazzara's Cosmo catches all the paradoxes and puzzles of the character, the wired ambition and the rapture over doom. Cassavetes' hoodlums, notably Seymour Cassel, are all unfailingly polite. The one exception is Timothy Carey as a fang-toothed, philosophical hood who eats dinner wearing white gloves and likes to quote the great thinkers. Cassel is curious about why Carey declines to fulfill his assignment and kill Gazzara. Carey curls his lips over his gums, lets a little foam drip, and says, "Like Karl Marx said: opium is the religion of the people...