PINK FLOYD THE WALL Directed by Alan Parker (MGM/UA Entertainment Co.)

by Vernon Gibbs

As a Pink Floyd fanatic, my biggest fear has always been that on some apocalyptic night as I sat with the rest of the Pinkoid horde deep in a concrete canyon, waiting to be dazzled, Roger Waters' prerecorded voice would loom through the quadrophonic sound system to announce that "Pink isn't well, we stayed back at the hotel," and I would have to contend with some overwhelming visual spectacle that had Pink Floyd's cranial throb, Pink Floyd's death of the universe personality, but not even a glimpse of those guilty rich.

Well, unfortunately for 95.5% of the Floyd forces, that nightmare is now officially a reality. As the spectacle of each tour became more grandiose it became obvious that one day Pink Floyd would mount a concept so momentous that it would be too expansive to take on tour. That's exactly what happened with The Wall, an idea of such staggering proportions that it could only be performed on stage in New York, Los Angeles, West Germany and England. Without a doubt, The Wall concerts were—to quote Alan Parker, the director of Pink Floyd The Wall and a lifelong Pink Floyd Freak—"Rock Theatre on the grandest scale, probably more grandiose and ambitious than it has even been. The sound was awesome, the Floyd musically precise and Roger's primal scream, the fears of madness, oppression and alienation cutting through the giant theatricals. You couldn't fail to be astonished by the sheer scale."

Loverly! But where does that leave you, the average Pink who fueled the Floyd machine up to the point where they could afford to build and demolish a Wall on stage during a night's performance? You helped Richard Wright outbid the King of Sweden for a mansion, you fired up their legend by spreading the word on their unparalleled stage shows, the least you deserve is the live presentation of the greatest rock spectacle of all time. You'd be willing to pay $35.00 for a ticket (r was offered $200.00 for my Wall -concert tickets). So come on Floyd, how about budging from those mansion Walls?

While we won't hold our breath for that occurrence, as a sop to their fans we now have Pink Floyd The Wall. Basically it's a visualization of the album The Wall, the entire story being told through those now familiar songs with a few new ones thrown in. There is no dialog, but the images are so overpowering that no dialogue is needed. The movie will strengthen the reputation Pink Floyd has established for being the best sound and visual technicians of the rock era, as director Alan Parker (Fame) and animator Gerald Scarfe (who did the animation for The Wall concerts and the Wish You Were Fiere tour) match Floyd's music with eyeboggling sequences so intense that they leave you shaken to the core. "I think it's worth repeating that war is horrific, I think it's'worth repeating it until you're blue in the face until you're confronted with this unpleasant hatred. I'm glad I did it because it's one of the first British Impressionist films ever made, like a Fellini film or the German Impressionist cinema. I wouldn't compare it to Tommy or any other rock film, most of which I think are garbage. The highest compliment you can pay the film is that it makes you think. It was quite a shock seeing for the first time, because it didn't come out anything like what I expected. It left me drained in the same way I left Apocalypse Now drained—it drags you by the ears through this very unpleasant experience and you come out the other end completely silent, wondering what the fuck was that. And I think that's good. When you think that a movie is supposed to be a passive experience, and here you have people walking out because it's too intense for them, not because they're bored, I think that's very good. Instead of like in a horror movie where you put your hands over your eyes and wait for it to stop, this is so relentlessly hateful and the product of guilt and insecurities by two massive egos, Roger Waters and Alan Parker, that I think it's something quite powerful."

Most of the criticism of the film has been leveled at the storyline. Pink loses his father in World War II and is raised by a typically British mother. He goes to a typically British school where he is force-fed an education and humiliated like everyone else. He grows Up to become an international rock star and as the "rigors" of stardom begin to close in on him he withdraws into a world of booze, drugs and cheap sex. His wife leaves him and this final "brick" causes him to go over the edge into madness. He imagines himself to be a Hitler type megalomaniac and his skinhead, jackbooted mobs take to the streets to terrorize "jews, coons, pot smokers and people with spots."

Words like "naive," "trivial," "bombastic," and "simplistic" have been used to describe Pink Floyd The Wall but folks are lining up to see it anyway. In England it outgrossed Raiders Of The Lost Ark within a similar time period and was the # 1 film in France shortly after opening. Nevertheless, agreement on the simple-mindedness of the message came from, of all places, Bob Geldof, lead singer of The Boomtown Rats, who plays Pink. He agreed to talk to us after demanding that the Rats someday grace the cover of CREEM.

"I thought politically it was spurious and a little naive and somewhat cliched," says Geldof without flinching. He is sitting in a hotel room looking not unlike Pink, his face is thick with stubble and his eyes are red spots swimming in a dark sea. He has already blasphemed by admitting a dislike for Pink Floyd's music, has said that he never listened to The Wall and has called Floyd's music "linear" with "rather obvious concepts." He has said all this, but he wants to redeem himself.

Geldof claims The Wall is partly Roger Waters' "self-pitying" | autobiography (Waters' father was killed in action in World War II), and partly a tribute to Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd's original leader, who went nuts after the group broke big.

"I think Syd and Roger had a rivalry, but I think Roger still views him with great affection, even though Syd is still pretty off the wall. But also as a person, Roger Waters' parents were Communists. So here you have this man with a middle class background, from Communist parents, and he becomes very successful because of talent, and he feels very guilty about it. He's also very insecure and he just doesn't have a chip on his shoulder, he's got a towering inferno. The same is true of Alan Parker—who's a successful filmmaker from a working class background and he's guilty because he's made some money.

"There was a lot of fighting when the cutting was being done, but there was a lot of tension during the filming. They had a lot of polite conversations and smiles, but they hated each other. I personally think it wouldn't have happened without Parker, his contribution was absolutely essential. It would have been extremely narrow and boring otherwise, and the visuals wouldn't have been as stunning and the editing wouldn't have been the tour deforce that it is. But it was Roger's baby, and Scarfe was originally going to direct it but got blown out, and that hurt his pride. Here are three guys at the peaks of their profession: Scarfe is Britain's foremost political cartoonist, Waters is reckoned to be a great writer and Parker is rated as one of the greatest British directors. Here are three men with ludicrously large egos, always in charge of what they do, with three separate ideas of what they were gonna do. Scarfe would come up with an idea and a drawing, then Waters would come up with another idea, then Parker would come up with an idea and they would all be pushing each other further left field. Sometimes it would resolve into bitter wrangling: Parker walked off the set three times and now they're not talking to each other. There were nearly fisticuffs at several points in the film. It was really pathetic, to be nearly 40 and not have your ego sorted out is really sad. But even the guys in Pink Floyd don't like each other very much, so maybe it's not surprising."

If any group has the power to turn their fans loose in the streets, it's Pink Floyd—whose music alternates between trancelike dirges and stirring metal chills. But Geldof sees no danger in Roger Waters projecting himself as the next savior of the "master race."

"A lot of people who don't really understand rock 'n' roll got hung up on that idea, but have you ever seen a fascist rock band? I have never seen a band use their potential for power in any evil way. They aren't trying to sell anything except what their point of view was. It's a conceptual idea, Pink Floyd remain anonymous all the time so it's impossible for them to become megalomaniac figures. What they do onstage is like theater, and then you're consciously being theatrical then it's not dangerous. That's actually wrong, because the Nazis were being consciously theatrical, but the Floyd were doing it to show the evil of it.

"We did have these long arguments that we were making the violence too seductive instead of obnoxious, but when I saw it happening I was freaked. There I was, watching myself, and it seemed disgusting. It's really sickening, and it's quite obvious. There is no cheering ever during this film. People come in and they'rq ready for a party, but by the time it's over people leave the theater stunned."

Sleaze,

New Jerzy

PINBALL by Jerzy Kosinski (Bantam)

PLATINUM LOGIC by Tony Parsons (Delilah)

The hype sheet sent along with my reviewer's copy of famed absurdist author Jerzy Kosinski's so-called rock 'n' roll novel, Pinball, claims that Kosinski explores the following "provocative" themes. Among them: Is pop star invisibility a viable creative alternative or just an ultra-hype? Is celebrityhood a prerequisite for success? A barrier to creative identity? Is creative commitment to classical music a more enriching artistic investmentthan one to rock? However, the letter writer forgot to pose one other significant thematic challenge implicit in reading Pinball: Can a man who understands next to nothing about what creativity motivates most rock music stars and knows even less about how the business is run get away with foisting off his reputation on an ignorant book? The answer, my friends, is blowing down every inaccurate landscape Kosinski draws of the South Bronx—he's trapped in a lie.

The premise of Pinball is actually a lot more intellectually tantalizing than Britisher Tony Parsons' latest rip-read foray into the oh-so-rotten heart of American rock 'n' roll (hold on Tony, I'll come back for you later). Kosinski gives us a rock star named Goddard, infinitely successful and totally reclusive. The guy's got secret identities, uses disguises to correspond with his label and obviously, never performs live (no, it's not Peter Frampton). The idea of a woman—determined to unmask Goddard for her own selfish purpose—who reels him in with tantalizing letters is fascinating. It is also improbable, if we care to draw any parallels with the feeble attempts made to reveal KISS when they were at their zenith.

If Kosinski wished to comprehend rock 'n' roll as a two-way mirror that can confuse illusion with reality, I'd accept it. This does happen frequently, as superstars lose track of why they first got their label deal and upstarts bomb corporate ivory towers from the streets. But Kosinski's Goddard stays anonymous to remain ordinary, and sings lyrics that are embarrassingly pretentious.

What 1 find even more of a fraud is Kosinski's scheme to write about an industry and use locations with which he has at best a passing acquaintance. Patrick Domostroy, an over-the-hill classical composer who has been called Kosinski's atuobiographical character in Pinball, lives in an abandoned ballroom in the South Bronx, where he brings his girlfriends and puzzles out Goddard's identity .

Sure he does, this middle class white guy. C'mon, pal, don't try to put this jive over on a Bronx native with a South Bronx-raised husband.

Kosinski's disaffection with rock, and perhaps even his antagonism to it, are evident throughout Pinball, but he tosses around words like "punk," "John Lennon" and "Jimi Hendrix" to presumably boost his credibility. All the hip vocabulary counts for nothing when he writes fantasy, believing in fact, as in the following information a hairdresser "knowledgably" gives Domostroy: "Look, having your own recording studio is not a big gig these days!.. .There's one punk rock guy who has a penthouse studio with all the soundtrack equipment and electronic gear you could imagine—right on York Avenue, overlooking the river! And not one of the guy's funkadelics has ever even hit the top forty!" Somebody quick, tell the Ramones what they missed.

Pinball tries to be art, but the latest by professional American-hater Tony Parsons sprouts is blatant intentions on the cover of Platinum Logic; sex & drugs & rock 'n' roll.. .The book seems to have been a big seller in the U,K-, and why not, with its tale of an independent label called Mammon of Manhattan Records (subtle, that) which rises to equal the corporate giants by its ruthless exploitation of hackneyed talent. The talent, naturally, is prone to drug excesses, eating fits and shopping frenzies, while the executives favor drug excesses, heart attacks and acquisitive greed. For comic relief. Parsons gives us a record executive's wife who gets her kicks, sometimes literally, picking up rough trade, the exec's daughter, who makes a career out of hating her mother and an Arab honcho in the company who gets cramped in the closet.

Platinum Logic is far more obvious in its intent than Pinball, which makes it the less offensive read, if also the less skillfully written one. Either Parsons is still taking a lot of his beloved speed or else he was fueled by frustration at not being able to destroy the New York music industry on his brief visits here. He spends over 500 pages spewing his venom, setting up his nasty little characters, watching them fall and gloating.

It is a fervent, if faint hope of mine that one day, someone who knows the pleasures and the miseries of the rock music culture will create a contemporary novel possessing as much empathy, righteous anger, excitement, joy and understanding as the best nonfiction books in the field have. Neither of these comes close.

Toby Goldstein

Benji Takes A Dive

BENJI AT MARINELAND (ABC Special)

Benji is the only thing I like better than wake-up calls. An inspiring, multi-faceted dawg, he can actually cute on command, tilt his head a lot and even grovel if the situation calls for it. Can you?

While the plucky pooch didn't appear particularly thrilled to star in this Joe "Death" Camp production, he still woofed it like a real pro. The only hint of boredom was the lifeless expression on his doglips. Can pooches be said to experience ennui?

All star cast: Jessie Davis (first gig in five years), a guy in a blue blazer named Mr. Walker (possibly Marineland's golf pro) and a troupe of very cheap Muppets called The Mulberry Squares. Quite a collection, they are: spongy replicas of Capt. Klink, Quick Draw McGraw, Arlene Francis, the Hamburgler and Country Joe McDonald.

America's favorite mongrel kicked it off with a lot of nervous running around the edge of the pool, followed by what one of the puppets called "a great bellywhopper for dogkind." Splash. The unspoken fear in his watery brown eyes: do dolphins like dogmeat?

The troubled hound shook off his mangy moneymaker and stood at attention (doggy-style) while Jessie baby sang Benji's theme song, appropriately titled "I Dunno." Now, you've got it all wrong, Jesse. I Dunno is in center field and Who Cares is in right.

Cut to gill time. You already know how this part goes. Dolphins jump through earrings, experiment wth waterproof mascara and squeal like hogs in transit. Then Mr.

Walker stomps out and flings 'em some yummy flounder niblets. Mmmm—tastes so good, you forget the fiber!

The multi-talented mutt shook his head a couple times and then stretched real adorably. He'd better—if he wasn't so loveable there'd be a bounty on his rotten hide.

The next segment of this actionpacked half hour showcased Mr. Walker. He'd actually changed blazers for this one. I couldn't really tell what the insignia over his heart stood for, but there was a picture of a fork on it.

Anyway, Walker (the next Elvis?) ran some killer sharks through the dreaded 1-3-1 zone defense. Benji responded by hiding in a box labeled Cutty Sark (I swear), then leaped out yapping for a fishbone. What a script!

Our canine comedian seemed very faraway through all this. Dreaming of Betty Jo's smoking tunnel? Who knows, maybe he's on something. Animal trainers are notorious for passing on whatever veterinarian drugs they can't snort themselves to their trainees. Image of Benji on angel dust biting the snarks and pushing Mr. Walker in the drink.

Fin-ale time! Here's the pup-tense on a yacht with a fishbowl over his head being chased to a big metal platform ..All right! Davy Jones's locker for being too damn cute!

No such luck. It's just a diving platform he's using to sink to a depth no human has ever stooped to and check out the "strange and mysterious creatures of the deep sea." That's funny, they didn't say anything about the Cramps in the credits.

Emitting perverse Sea Hunt vibes, the breathless bowser looked even stupider underwater. You could tell the fish were offended— they're holding their noses. And all this to the "tune" of another Jessie Davis song. Get this guy a cement snorkel before he reproduces! It's already too late for the randy Rover.

But my favorite commercial came on and snatched serendipity from the jaws of looking up more dog synonyms. You've probably seen it yourself—the one where the kid asks "Do you want to smell my towel?"

Depends on where you've been drying yourself, little girl.

Rick Johnson

No Class

by Edouard Dauphin

Any movie produced in Canada with a score by Fear, Timothy Van Patten, Alice Cooper and Lalo Schifrin has at least four strikes against it—still, the Dauph admired Class Of 1984, a predictable update of the '50s classic Blackboard Jungle, with overtones of Animal House and an occasional touch of They Saved Hitler's Brain.

Flick is set in the fictitious LincQln High School where the teachers carry guns in their attache cases and the students blow up more cars than Wendy Williams at a Chrysler plant. New teacher Perry King transfers there from Nebraska, with his pregnant wife Merrie Lynn Ross, hoping to instill a love for the music of Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky among the kids in the infamous '84 class. He appears doomed.

A gang of five, led by Timothy Van Patten (he of the Tuscan popeating clan) are the real trouble-makers of the school, junior Visigoths who rob, pillage, sell drugs, run an extortion racket and slam dance very badly. They wear spiked bracelets, safety pins in their noses, swastika t-shirts and look like they graduated with Johnny Rotten in the Class of 1974.

Perry learns the Lincoln ropes from Roddy MacDowell, an embittered, alcoholic biology teacher who loves his lab creatures but thinks his students are animals. In between belts of Canadian Club, Roddy explains that the scuzzball quintet has turned the school into an armed camp where switchblades and straight edged razors are as common as pimples at a Rick Springfield concert. But Perry thinks he can change that.

His music class can only play a pathetic version of "Moon River" but Perry soon has them striving for improvement, despite regular visits from Van Patten and pals who would buy The Clash Sings Henry Mancini only if each copy came with a dog collar. "Life is pain and pain is everything," intones Van Patten somberly—he must have studied rhetoric with dad Dick, who once advised us all that "Eight Is Enough," then proceeded to prove that on the show, he was enough. For his idealism. Perry sees his car firebombed, one of his prize students sacrificed, another stabbed in the gut—plus his trombonist is constantly out of tune. Friend Roddy sees his beloved lab rabbits and cat skinned and roasted on a spit, which takes away his appetite for junk food entirely. After holding his class at gunpoint, Roddy then embarks on a maniacally suicidal car ride that resembles The Dauph driving home from Carla's Hi-Hat Lounge on any given Friday night.

Come the school band concert and Van Patten's stooges kidnap Merrie Lynn, forcing her to pose nude for rude Polaroids which are then shown to Perry just before he is to begin conducting the 1812 Overture. Naturally, he throws down his baton leaving the orchestra stranded. What they play with a student conductor sounds like Bram Tchaikovsky's 1978 Overture. The best is saved for last. Suffice to say that both Van Patten and the school orchestra struggle through final movements together.

See Class Of 1984 and get extra credit.

☆ ☆ ■

You went to see Friday The 13th and thought it was a nifty horror film. You paid good money for Friday The 13th Part 2 and thought it sucked weasel. Now you notice there's another sequel, this one in 3D. You are wondering whether to plunk down your hard-earned shekels for this picture. Do not bother.

In Friday The 13th, Part 3, the story continues. Correct that, it is just done over. A new crop of sausage-brained teenagers is back at Crystal Lake—don't the police ever close down this place? Dana Kimmel, lone survivor from the last flick, is one of the returnees—guess this dope really has nowhere better to go for the summer. Her boyfriend, Paul Kratka, equally doltish, has to be reminded of the time he took Dana home and she was ravaged by a massive, hideous, blood-crazed fiend. Well, some things do slip a fella's mind.

Jason, the indestructible monster of Crystal Lake is up to old tricks, bashing heads, wrenching limbs apart and, in the movie's only good sequence, shooting an arrow into some kid's eye. As usual, nobody thinks seriously of getting the hell out of there, but you probably will soon enough.

The 3D works pretty well during the opening credits but that's about it. The edges of the screen are consistently blurred and the shock effects are so carefully set up in advance, they don't surprise you when they come popping into your lap. Adding to the insult, the first 10 minutes is a reprise of the last film so it's in 2D, though many of the bj'ain-fried moviegoers at the Loew's State didn't know the difference and wore their glasses anyway.

Skip this redundant tripe and if there's another sequel, let's go to Crystal Lake ourselves and rip Jason's lungs out. 7&'