Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Some of his friends reported that he was habitually short of cash. Though other friends denied it, the story interested suspicious Roman police when they learned that he had even joked about solving his financial problems by arranging his own "perfect kidnaping," which police noted was curiously similar in plot to the one in the movie Travels with My Aunt, currently playing in Rome. The night he disappeared he was seen having an argument with a blonde Belgian go-go dancer in the Piazza Navona, where hippies gather. She resisted his passes and he stormed away, yelling back an Italian...
...essays). According to Gass, fiction has too long been regarded as a way of looking at reality, when it is, in fact, an addition to it. The author is not mirroring the real world, he's creating a new one--a world of language and ideas, where character and plot become subordinated. Jason and Medeia is just such a "conceptual system." It is a truly novel epic poem, "an absolute tissue of rules." But more than that, it is what Gass calls a metafiction, a compound of fictional forms, new built into old, with layer upon layer of meaning...
Brother Carl takes at least a dozen steps in the right direction. That leaves it still some distance short, but it is certainly a beginning. Sontag has reduced her influences to Bergman alone here. She has made concessions to coherence of plot and plausibility of character. She has this time made a film that can be sat through...
Eleanor Perry's script does not have the funk to be exciting or enough true spirit to transcend the wind-blown banalities of the plot. Most bothersome is the conception of Catherine as a selfish, useless whiner who is brought to her senses and full womanhood through the ministrations of Grobart. Even if Cat Dancing is meant to be only a kind of soap-oater fantasy, it is an especially demeaning...
...leave them prey to Coburn's mercy, the crumbling self-images which they are struggling to maintain through his promised largesse, is never explored. The events on the yacht pass through their minds without triggering a trace of self-realization. Their lives are framed as veneer on a tricky plot. Unable to scare up interest in its pursuit of a killer, and without the commitment to analyze its characters, Sheila goes down flashily, like a luxury liner, overloaded with champagne...