Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Padrone presents an unflinching look at the true story of Gavino Ledda's very personal struggle to overcome the domination of the intractable patriarch who denied him any opportunity for an education--a struggle which results in his becoming a linguist and bestselling author. So much for the basic plot. But this triumphant movie, the first internationally acclaimed Taviani brothers film, can be approached on two other levels--one structural, the other more stylistic. In one sense, Padre, Padrone develops within a movie-as-book format; based on Ledda's autobiography, the film's three-part, linear structure reminds...
Blue Country has even less of a plot than Tacchella's Cousin, Cousine and of fers less romantic consolation than that extraordinarily popular movie. A kind of pastoral "Hecksapoppin," it is, like its predecessor, full of rich comic types and amusing asides. Above all, it makes you feel good as you leave the theater, which is more than you generally find in a comedy these days...
...made an asteroid out of yourself!"). Or, alternately, the Silly Joke ("Don't Be a Dope Head, Buy a Moped"). Or, alternately, the Cliche ("Let's Do It"); it's 2078, after all. As far as I could discern from the production notes, the main plot-line consists of a mad grab by three Human Cliches (or were they Human Puns?)--a Harvard student, a Man/Woman from Outer Space, and a Diabolical Villain with Madison Avenue Experience--for the right to be the last person cloned on Earth, and cloned with a vengeance at that--1000 times, hence the title...
Perhaps most important. Reid manages in a fine Irish fashion to carry a story. All the absurd trivialities of plot and subplot--with IRA goons, federal goons, British goons and even a few goons on personal retainer to the President of the United States, all doing their best to run each other over and muddy the storyline--finally mesh together in Hollywood style. Perhaps the setting makes the book more interesting than it really is: having set his story in Cambridge, Reid takes a name-dropper's perverse delight in alluding regularly to parts of the Harvard campus, which...
...robs it of all possible fun. Coma could use lines like, "You think I'm m-m-mad, don't you?" because without them there's no reason for seeing the movie--it doesn't move very fast, the sluggish climax lets you down, and there aren't enough plot twists to keep a 5-year-old guessing...