Word: film
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Time of the Gypsies -- what a drab handle for such a sprawling, enthralling entertainment. The title promises a 60 Minutes-style expose on purse snatching and child exploitation in the tourist capitals of Europe. And is anyone in a hurry to see a 2-hr. 22-min. film in Romany with English subtitles? As it happens, the movie does take time for side trips from Yugoslavia to Italy, to show young Gypsies stealing and pimping at their bosses' stern whims. But its heart is in a Serbian village of Gypsies, where outcasts find a family and fevered dreams...
...sixty drawings, prints and collages that comprise the exhibit are organized around four themes: "The Wild West," "The Metropolis," "Social and Political Critique," and "Popular Culture: Jazz, Dance, and Film." The images depicted run the gamut from reverence to condemnation of an American culture viewed with ambivalence...
Other reviewers, such as Film Comment's Harlan Jacobson, have pointed out numerous liberties that Moore takes with time and facts. The number of 1986 GM layoffs in Flint, for example, was about 5,000, not the 30,000 implied in the film. The company contends that many employees simply retired or accepted voluntary terminations or transfers to GM jobs elsewhere. Three huge commercial projects, which the city mistakenly hoped would revive prosperity, opened and failed before the 1986 layoffs, though Moore hints that they came partly as a response to GM's cuts. Says Flint Mayor Matthew S. Collier...
...United Auto Workers, both of which take their lumps in Roger & Me, are handing out copies of Pauline Kael's scathing New Yorker review of the film. To Moore, who is happy to argue every debatable point in Roger & Me, "these critics see themselves as culture police, telling us what a documentary is. Roger & Me was intended as a movie for people to go to on a Friday night. It's not an NBC White Paper, not an episode of Nova. To the guardians of the documentary, I apologize that the picture is entertaining...
Which is precisely, of course, why a big studio like Warner bought the film. "They're in the trend business; they have to be tuned in," says Moore. "Millions of working Americans are fed up with ten years of Reagan and Bush. People want to see a movie that speaks to that concern and need." In addition, the movie industry may have bought itself an eccentric superstar. Wouldn't it be funny if it took GM's most nettlesome antagonist since Ralph Nader to lead Hollywood to the heartbeat of America...