Word: macdonaldization
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FREE FALL IN CRIMSON by John D. MacDonald Harper & Row; 246 pages...
...attack on the crew-seems the technicians had been using local teenagers for a series of porno video tapes. Predictably, their leader, a villain named Dirty Bob, manages to slip through some elaborate defenses and tracks McGee to his opulent houseboat, the Busted Flush. The result is one of MacDonald's King Kong vs. Godzilla confrontations that deliver a soul-satisfying amalgam of mayhem and justice...
...somehow it works, despite the fact that the setting (Santa Barbara, Calif.) and the plot (which involves, among other factors, sins of an older generation) appear to be borrowed from Ross Macdonald. It works, in part, because Czech-born Director Ivan Passer (Intimate Lighting) is a junk-ball twirler with an ability to put a loony backspin on bitterness. In his pictures people strike out laughing. More important, he finds a way to make one care about losers without imputing hidden heroic virtues to them. And Writer Fiskin knows how to construct revealing scenes economically, with characters talking truly tough...
...formally constitute themselves as the Social Democrats within the next month, they will become the first significant national party to be formed in Britain since Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in 1932. For Labor, it was the most dramatic defection since 1931, when Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald led a walkout in order to head a national government...
...cussedness" we get plenty--a freewheeling assortment of burlesque gags and visual stunts. Wood grew up in the world of British music halls, and the influence appears in his predilection for puns, wordplay, and sexual humor (men in drag and a woman, Mary Jane Pendejo--played by Karen MacDonald--as Major Trumbull). This is wonderful entertainment, but it's going nowhere; Wood's view of moviedom--war as a ribald chaos prevents the play from establishing any dramatic focus or momentum, and the act lapses into a number of extraneous routines. It remains a wild burlesque with some high points...