Word: nighttown
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Holleran knows the limits of stoicism. He qualifies the old saying "Life is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think" with "Too schematic . . . most of us think and feel." Ground Zero is the proof. It is a tragicomic tour through Manhattan's homosexual nighttown: the gay bathhouses, pornographic theaters and bars that the author cruised a decade ago. He finds the atmosphere radioactive with fear; sperm reminds him of plutonium. In this subdued climate, Holleran finds new enjoyment with his surviving gay companions. He meets many over freshly dug graves and notes the difference...
...bacon bits at a sumptuous salad bar. The connecting sequence, by Bill Bryden, takes way too long to let John Hurt dress up as Pagliaccio. Charles Sturridge's essay for La Forza del Destino -- an urban mural of children's faces -- is all dour style, a Bugsy Malone in Nighttown. The Bruce Beresford segment, from Erich Korngold's Die tote Stadt, is content to watch two young people disrobe in an English mansion. Robert Altman had the inspiration to show a restless 17th century audience at Rameau's Les Boreades, then neglected to develop his night-at-the-opera sketch...
William Kennedy's novel Ironweed was 227 pages of the DTs, a funny boohoo ramble through Nighttown, an interior dialogue between Francis and his ghosts. It won a Pulitzer Prize and a healthy audience for the other novels (Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game) in Kennedy's Albany trilogy, with its wry poetic naturalism. The bums in Ironweed were not noble, but they had their own gravelly, poignant voices. The family Francis left behind was ordinary as linoleum, but their emptiness left a sympathetic ache in the reader's gut. Francis was drab and cramped on the outside, that...
Demme (Melvin and Howard) is on higher ground and does a snappier dance. E. Max Frye's script offers a careering trip through the East Coast Nighttown previously explored by Desperately Seeking Susan, After Hours and Blue Velvet. Solid Citizen Jeff Daniels meets Madcap Airhead Melanie Griffith and in a trice is stripped, handcuffed, kidnaped, beaten up and plied with big wet licky kisses. Natch, he goes for it. "What are you gonna do," Melanie asks, "now that you've seen how the other half lives . . . the other half of you." Daniels holds together better than the movie, which lurches...
...just a little fizzier than the merely lifelike, encouraged his cameraman Michael Ballhaus to light it one notch brighter than reality, one notch darker than fantasy. His splendid actors never pause to explain their strange behavior. The result is a delirious and challeng- ing comedy, a postmodern Ulysses in Nighttown...