Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...feeble plot has to do with what Roberts refers to as "scorching exposes" aired on the school's own television station. Not only is it mysteriously able to afford such electronic luxuries, but the student reporters have enviable connec tions in high places. They expose everything from White House "plumbers" and shaky missile deals to consumer fraud and child abuse. This does not go down well in a small southwestern town, and its ill will bubbles over into a slaughter by National Guardsmen obviously modeled on Kent State...
...pointedly recall the historic religious practice, which Eastern Orthodox Christians still widely observe and Roman Catholics have only recently moved away from. The new fasts, for example, have been called by many churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant, for Wednesdays, a traditional Christian fast day once associated with Judas' plot to betray Christ. The goal is not usually a complete fast but a general cutback in the amount of food eaten. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations will launch an antihunger campaign this month that includes, among other things, a recommendation for "un-dinners," complete with programs and speakers...
Because Lysistrata was written two thousand years ago by Aristophanes, it seems "bawdy" and "ribald" more than sophomoric and thin. There's nothing except sexual silliness to its plot about a smart Athenian woman, Lysistrata (Judith Listfield) who forms a league between all Greek women to force their husbands--by withholding sex from them--to end the Peloponnesian war. The Dunster production takes Lysistrata a little more lightly than it was intended (Aristophanes wrote it during the Peloponnesian war) but so long as you expect only a pretext for laughs, you won't be gravely disappointed...
There are only two ways to mount a project like this: for gilded fun, which is fair enough, or for serious suspense, which is perilous, considering the mechanics of the plot. Director Sidney Lumet tries to avoid the problem in typical fashion-by getting around it. He tries to make the pasteboard characterizations more winning, if hardly more real, by casting luminaries in the roles...
...until Act II that Davies allows the main plot to develop--the rise of Mr. Black and the People's Army and the fall of Flash. Mr. Black capitalizes upon Flash's fall from grace in the public eye to implement his ideal, a kind of brave new world in which all men are artificial robots programmed to run at maximum efficiency. Preservation finds its denouement in Mr. Black's ultimate behaviorial mechanization of Flash, leaving one with many of the same thoughts as did A Clockwork Orange...