Word: film
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...having achieved everything he wanted in life with barely a ripple of difficulty. It's harder still when his widow controls many of the rights to his works and image and remains a controversial figure in his story. For those reasons, Buddy bears a striking resemblance to the 1978 film The Buddy Holly Story, starring Gary Busey, including a tendency to make saints of the singer and his wife and cartoon cads of almost everyone else. The real reason for telling Holly's story again is as an excuse for a rock concert...
...film is determined to be about something less interesting than sexual combustion. Max is a neat freak, Nora a slob, so for a reel they play Oscar and Felix. She has no friends, his are nudgy -- this movie hates middle- class Jews a lot. Then the lovers must break up and make up, and the ho boy! becomes ho hum. White Palace settles into stolid ordinariness, after flirting with being a handsome essay on the grandeur of reciprocal lust...
...Sioux give Dunbar -- is a movie that is very easy to make fun of, and not merely because of Dunbar's risible ahistoricism. It would be nice, for instance, to meet some white man, other than Dunbar, who is not a brutish lout. And it would not harm the film if there were one or two bad-natured Sioux visible in it. (The Pawnee, who obviously need a p.r. consultant, are portrayed as the scourge of the prairies.) It is, as well, all too easy to see why Costner -- or any actor -- would want to direct himself in the role...
...director, Costner is alive to the sweep of the country and the expansive spirit of the western-movie tradition. The good guys and the bad guys have exchanged their traditional roles in his film, but their contentions are staged with style and energy. In this reversal there is, just possibly, redemption, not only of historical crimes but also of a movie genre lately fallen into decrepitude. It is possible, surprisingly, to imagine John Ford happy in the great multiplex...
...noble thing for a man to rescue his humble forebears from obscurity, to make something grand, even epic out of their lives. Barry Levinson, whose most recent films have been notable commercial successes (Good Morning, Vietnam; Rain Man), has been widely praised by reviewers for attempting a movie that tries to make something instructive out of his family's past. Avalon, which Levinson directed and wrote, is a handsome and conscientiously made film, tracing the modest fortunes and misfortunes of the Krichinskys, an extended family of Jewish immigrants in Baltimore, over some 50 years...