Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Hardwick's discussion becomes a shuffling of "great colorful playingcards," because from Richardson to Hawthorne to George Eliot's Adam Bede, women are neither fully tragic heroines nor psychologically complete people. They are just so many characters composed of arbitrary qualities that work for the author's conception of plot...
While the plot might have been cribbed from Agatha Christie, the main character seems to have sprung straight out of a Charles Addams cartoon. At the age of 14 Young was sentenced to 15 years in the maximum-security Broadmoor mental hospital for having attempted to poison a classmate, his father and his sister. His stepmother died shortly after his confinement. Young admitted during the trial last month that she was the first person he had poisoned with thallium...
...exciting if preposterous 22-hour standoff follows between the cop and the heroin pusher in, of all places, a Saks Fifth Avenue elevator. Outside, the television cameras roll while the police department brass squirm-and plot their own survival. It is a tribute to Mills' adroitness that he swivels through this awkward and unlikely setup with few slips. (The few mistakes he makes are surprisingly careless: Saks has hand-operated elevators, for example, which would make his big scene unplayable...
...humor rises and falls through each incident there is no climax to the film. Macunaima simply rollicks through Brazil until he dies, and the film ends, with the plot serving, as in a Marx Brothers vehicle, only to hold the episodes together...
...leave for the city when they are flooded out, and on the way Macunaima bathes in a magic fountain which turns him white--and into another actor. This white actor goes through several changes of hairstyle, which as far as I can tell have nothing to do with either plot or political significance, and which typify the director's casual attitude to details. During several crowd scenes some of the extras look more interested in the camera than in the antics of Macunaima, and when Macunaima dies, bloodily, in a stream, a rubber hose can dimly be seen pumping...