Word: pseudo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...average Sunday from 49% of the population in 1958 to 43% in 1968. The young are not as irreligious as they seem ?far from it. But most fail to recognize their religious impulse, and they satisfy it far away from the churches ?in Eastern (or pseudo-Eastern) mysteries, in drug reveries, in the noisy trance ,of rock, or sometimes in the touchable realities of nature...
...Alice are square (!) Right?! Of course, right. From the very beginning. in that Hollywood fashion we all love and adore, writer-producer Tucker and writer-director Mazursky have stacked the cards against Bob and Carol. They do this by making Bob and Carol not so much liberated as pseudo-liberated. Bob and Carol think they are hip, but as the audience happily discovers, they are actually phonies and assholes. Robert Culp is a middle-aged Peter Fonda who wears beads only because he's rich enough to get away with it: Natalie Wood is one of those snotty rich girls...
...pseudo-artsiness of the dream sequence is nothing in annoyance value compared to the performance of Michael Murphy's pit band. The musicians are seldom together, often out of tune, and usually spiritless. Conductor Murphy has little sense of tempo, and Philip Lang's nicely-orchestrated overture takes on a dirgelike quality that tends to make overture-lovers like myself cringe. (Note to Mr. Birnbaum: these people in the band are your enemies! Take a whip to them soon...
Back on the ground, with little but their own dignity to hide behind, Laurence Olivier, Harry Andrews, Ralph Richardson and Trevor Howard have some good sport impersonating various historical figures who stand about the control room looking grim but determined. There is a thunderous, pseudo-symphonic score to delude the audience into believing that various moments are tense, exciting, exhilarating, tragic, or all of those things at once. It also helps keep people awake during the movie's interminable 2-hr. 10-min. running time, in which it often seems that The Battle of Britain takes longer to watch...
Perhaps they felt that conversation with the objects of their protest would have destroyed the togetherness which radicals groove on during pseudo- revolutionary moments. Or possibly the guides knew that much of the information they were dispensing could have been easily challenged by members of the Center...