Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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MEDEA REQUIRES of the audience not a suspension of disbelief but a suspension of twentieth-century consciousness. It conforms to none of our traditional requirements for a believable plot, lifelike characters, coherent narrative, and psychological motivation. Nor, by all accounts, does it have much to do with the Euripides play on which it is based...
...plot, as the centaur says, is just deeds, and what gives this film its peculiar and forceful immediacy is the spirit in which these bizarre and seemingly unmotivated events are accepted. Director Pier Paolo Pasolini takes his story readymade, as he did earlier (1964) in the Gospel According to Saint Matthew. He makes no attempt to explain why such things came about, but merely how they must have happened--and how they appear to the participants, not to a modern audience. Taking Christ's life, he worked with Romans and peasants, shepherds and carpenters. With the story of Medea...
...screenwriters must have discovered their prehistoric plot frozen in a glacier. Christian Biton (Jean-Claude) runs a ski shop in Switzerland. He and his buddies have a pretty good thing going, selling equipment and eyeballing the snow bunnies who fall by with enviable frequency. "I have very strong thighs," says one in a voice that could turn hard pack to slush. Smirks one of the shop boys: "Maybe you'd like to feel my pectorals some time...
KING KONG's appeal runs deeper than its individual facets would seem to justify. The plot never transcends the ape-meets-girl, ape-gets-girl, ape-loses-girl framework. We have to assume the purity of Kong's love for Ann. Anything more carnal raises insuperable anatomical difficulties. Except for the deadpan delivery of a few antique cliches, the acting is entirely forgetable. Fay Wray screams very well, but the range of her talent ends at the top of her register. Special effects do retain much if not all of its wizardry. But the movie's charm comes from more...
...footage in this re-release adds a taste of horror and a heaping portion of the ridiculous. The plot goes unaltered, but Kong's cinematic character suffers some major blemishes. He eats people--chews on them, anyway--something he never did on daytime television. He chomps on a few native warriors and, during his New York stint, a businessman. He also steps on people. Most unfortunate of all is the woman living several flights down from Ann: Kong pulls her out through her bedroom window, but discovering she's not his girl, drops her--fifteen stories...