Word: heroic
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...production notes for this film say that Paul Schrader was born in Grand Rapids, where Hardcore's modest, acutely observed opening sequences are set. They also tell us he was raised in the stern Calvinist tradition that sustains the heroic father figure (George C. Scott) as he searches for his runaway teen-age daughter. The girl has disappeared into the demimonde of pornographic film production in California, with its attendant agonies of drug addiction and prostitution. Schrader's feeling for the small-town society and values of his youth is respectful, never patronizing. There is an authenticity...
Schrader is making an attempt to redeem an American heroic myth. He is trying to say that in the simple perceptions of unsophisticated people there are a strength and decency too often underestimated by media pundits who have lost touch with the values by which most of America still lives. When we see Scott's anguish as he witnesses a porno film starring his daughter, then watch him plunge bravely into that awful and degrading world searching for his child, we cannot help being moved...
Dubin's descent is painful to watch but thoroughly absorbing, for his struggle assumes heroic dimensions. He is smart enough to bear the responsibility for his anguish and strong enough to fight...
That sort of thing is best left to serious movies; it has no place in films that are basically in the Boys' Own Adventure tradition, which even little kids understand are intended to glorify the heroic ideal. In such entertainments, the background events should be as undisturbingly abstract as that of a Road Runner cartoon. - Richard Schickel
...freelancer named Rosenbaum-has much to do with Watergate. Many journalists consider that scandal their calling's finest hour. Foster, writes Rosenbaum, "caught the crest of the wave of media fever that engulfed mid-Seventies America. Woodward and Bernstein brought down a President; Redford and Hoffman enshrined the heroic reporters as symbolic successors. The entire journalism profession swelled with newly inflated prestige, power and self-esteem." In Rosenbaum's cunning roman à Clay, however, the gleaming knights of the choice tables are less interested in truth and light than drugs and kinky sex, and they are otherwise...