CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

A Rage Of Cleavers

STILL THE BEAVER (CBS)

J. Kordosh

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Welcome once again to Mayfield, pop. 18,240. Yes, the land of giving guys the business, the happy hamlet where women bear All-American names (June, Mary Ellen) and men have names that sound like Bizarro Scrabble (Tooey, Lumpy.) The land of TV’s growing-uppest kid,

Theodore, and his family, the Cleavers: the Godfathers of Nice.

Although all seems well in Mayfield—which we last saw some 20 years ago— appearances are deceiving. Wally prefers to remember his winning basket in Mayfield High’s “big game” in lieu of performing his husbandly^, duties to Mary Ellen Cleaver, nee Rodgers. “It was 39 feet!” he reminds her more than once, and she—knowing what length he’s not referring to—bites a lip, her own Ward has been acting up and died, thus turning in an acting performance consistent with the earlier chapters of the Beaver saga. Larry Mondello’s found the Inner Light and changed his name to Vishnu, which is something like a born-again Christian changing his name to Jesus Christ to commemorate the occasion. Worst of all, the Beav’s been bounced from his own home by his wife, who’s (decided tb become a vet for moderately obvious reasons. The Beav, facing divorce, and Voltaire Perkins no longer sitting on the Divorce Court bench! My God, is the infield fly rule still in effect in Mayfield??

Yes, thankfully. In the face of this veritable tempest of change remain a few fixed points, most noticeably all-around cool guy Eddie Haskell, once again played masterfully by Ken Osmond. Arguably the single sanest character created by the tube, the adult Haskell has made a smooth transition to the grown-up world. He runs the Haskell Construction Company, which uses substandard materials while Eddie takes kickbacks. He’s still cracking wise (to Wally: “Some gratitude, Jack”) and he’s even fathered Eddie, Jr., an obvious role model for any kid. When the punk gets nailed for spray-painting the school, Eddie gets the show’s finest line (& to the probably still-

virginal Miss Canfield): “I understand young Edward’s been showing his mischievous side again.” Wotta dad!

Back-up puds like Lumpy, Tooey, and Mr. Rutherford have maintained their laudably limited world-views, while Beav’s old pal Richard has become a psychiatrist, something Mayfield’s been needing since Ward kicked, no doubt. Actually, Richard makes one of the more sanguine observations here when he. tells Beaver, “Your father was a perfect role model, and you always had a lot of food in your icebox.”

Naturally, though, our concern revolves chiefly about June,

Wally, and the Beaver. Barbara Billingsley’s held up well (albeit a bit long in the tooth to resurrect memories of her cold-blooded suburban sex-appeal). Her conversations with Ward’s grave are pretty much what you’d expect from a woman who can sit at a dinner table and say “Well, isn’t this nice?” without'eliciting mass nausea. I do believe June Cleaver could make ptomaine sound passably pleasant. The dame’s got it; she’s a survivor.

As for Wally: well, the cat’s aged gracefully. Still watching out for the Beav, Wardized enough to balk at screwing in his parents’ bedroom, relating to life as the Great Sports Metaphor (“Everybody I know is having babies. I’m tired of sitting on the

bench—I wanna get into the game.”). In an abstract way,

Wally was a genius at social interaction during the Leave It To Beaver days, and the character’s held up well. Hell, the guy looks like he really would be a great uncle to have around.

Which leaves the Beaver. Since Jerry Mathers hasn’t maintained his look as well as Tony Dow or Ken Osmond, the 33 year old Beaver doesn’t wash as well as Wally and Eddie. Within the context of the show (Beav versus the ghost of Ward), the overall effect isn’t bad, though. We’ve seen young Theodore go from

cute kid to gangly adolescent to pudgy man and—in all incarnations—he’s more-or-less fit the part. Somehow, it just seems right that the poor sap would still be wearing that damned baseball cap. Eddie might’ve described him most correctly in the physical sense (“Hey, kid, you’re putting on a little weight, eh?”), but wife Kimberly expressed the not-sohidden truth: “Beaver, you’re never going to change.” Which is obviously the way it should be in Mayfield, USA.

I Only Get My Rock Off When I’m Dreaming

RADIO 1?90 (ATI Video Enterprises)

Video rock will inevitably grow more and more crucial to the preservation of the species, especially as us ’60s-rockeyewitness veterans get our aging butts more and more firmly implanted into our easy chair cushions. Rock “concerts” and all the hard physical labor it takes to attend one of those hotshot nights out have almost gone the way of the dodo for me & the Mrs. already.

More fun (really!) these evenings to sit there in the family room in dunceably-solution bliss, passively slopping up whatever slice of rock life MTV deigns to toss out to us. Sure some of the videos and personalities stink, but screw discernment tonight, buddy! This is a better approximation of real life, where the doors of .perception are always getting slammed in yer face!

The MTV executones were obviously the firstest with the ^ mostest when it came to seizing upon the passive rock videoee concept, and they’ll undoubtedly zoom on as 'the General Motors of this growth industry. But there are a few beetle-like competitors beginning to crawl onto the ’waves, hot-time-tonight news indeed for those of us blessed with remote-punchee channel selector boxes.

The USA cable network has run its Night Flight rock news anthology for a couple years already, but that airs round ’bout weekend midnights, just at the time the younger turks are out boozing their livers into submission in rock “clubs,” and just as us greyshags who can still recall the present-tense Hendrix are snoozing off to deep escapist sleeps. Nobody home for Night Flight, so now USA has come up with Radio 1990 (seen thru the miracle of teevee, nonetheless), which should be readily accessible to all demographic types (airs at 7 P.M. weeknights in my market).

Radio 1990 is a breezy half hour of rock videos, interspersed with those breathless & deathless “rock news” items about who’s \ producing whose (or the exWho’s) new album, already such a staple of MTV’s 24-hour pigouts. Radio 1990’s news bits are delivered by veteran rockmedia wag Lisa Robinson, who seemingly continues to regard “our music” as one grand Rona Barrettian garden of earthly gossip.

Robinson’s talking-head skills are reasonably smooth, relative to The Master’s (MTV’s Triple-J Jackson, of course), but she hasia disquieting tendency to break into non-sequitur smiles in the midst of her copy, and it’s impossible for the casual viewer to tell whether someone is making faces at Lisa off camera, or whether she just thinks “Duran Duran” is a funny name. Meanwhile, the news item photo is expanding and contracting across the screen like a haywire artificial heart, alternately hiding and revealing Robinson’s smirky face.

But that only fits with the sleight-of-hand feel of Radio 1990’s whole visual format. To be fair, they do program a lot of videos (especially from black and country musicians) I haven’t seen on we-know-what-they-like MTV as yet, but Radio 1990 is also prone to mutilate its videos, cutting out when they’re half over to glide “seamlessly” into another vid or news clip. Plus the keypunched titles they print onto their innocent videos are sloppiness incarnate: garbled song titles, misspellings (for the zillionth

time, it’s “Capitol” Records, not “Capital”), and idiot-erroneous tidbits like “The Pretenders come from Akron, Ohio, home of Devo,” which slither across the screen with the relentlessness of tornado warnings.

Fast-paced is its own reward, of course, and before you can even work up a good snert about Radio 1990 interrupting Robinson’s blurb on Iggy Pop’s book with an oh-shit! Journey video, the show’s over. Just like that, and the credits are rolling by. Okay, two grids down the cable box and it’s back to the shelter of MTV’s all-night arms. Next question?

Richard Riegel

The Good, The Bad, And The Goopy

5001 NIGHTS AT THE MOVIES by Pauline Kael (Holt, Rinehart and Winston)

Although film critic Pauline Kael is no longer the rebel upstart who labeled 1965’s biggest, sappiest blockbuster The Sound Of Money, she has in no way softened her prickly personality. For example—in this current collection of capsule reviews, while critiquing the fairly famous but mostly forgettable kiddie flick My Friend Flicka, she offers this bit of faint but pungent praise:

“It’s one of the rare children’s films—old or new—that doesn’t choke you up with rage.”

It’s little observations like that which have given Kael the reputation of being a tough cookie. The Mikey of film criticism, her reviews seethe with various hatreds. She’s the enemy of complacent liberalism (Coming Home is “blandly humanitarian”), the scourge of pretentious piety (Au Hasard Balthazar is “offensively holy”), thte despoiler of unbridled romanticism (Garden Of Allah is “insanely goopy”), and the reviler of uplifting

morality plays (The Getting Of Wisdom is a “self-infatuated fantasy...presented in the guise of harsh realism.”) Kael hates sham, she loathes pomposity, she savages sentimentality, she is repulsed by hypocrisy. In short, she’s just the kinda dame that Marshall Crenshaw’s been looking for.

Far from being merely a hardened curmudgeon, her combative feelings arise as films act on her intelligently humane and perhaps overly-sensitive self. She said as much on the Cavett show, explaining how criticism was, for her, a “sensitizing” process. Or was it the Snyder show? No matter. Watching an atrocity like Making Love, a flick wherein whatever courage the producers might have shown in taking on the project is totally mitigated by the cowardice of the final product, one thinks “Kael’s gonna have a ball with this one,” and looks forward to the incisive, informed and humanely sensitive slaughter. For the moviegoer beset by inane and alienating movies, she represents a kind of vengeance.

After 30-some years of countering the old establishment ideas of what constitutes a respectable, decent picture, she is now more influential than controversial. Kael still gets her share of flak and from a variety of quarters, the most interesting flakmakers in recent years being Renata Adler in The New York Review Of Books, Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice, and Mitch Tuchman in the late, lamented Canadian mag Take One. Adler’s attack was amusing because it seemed almost a parody of establishment outrage, what with the snobbish intellectual berating the vulgarian intellectual as much for her foul manners (grammar) as for her upsetting ideas—for using the wrong critical fork, as it were. Sarris’s attack was juicy, since he took Kael’s attack on his own critical criteria personally and responded in kind. Tuchman’s

approach was a little tortuous, linking Kael’s apparent disdain for the mass audience to her roots in late ’30s Berkeley radicalism and its subsequent souring, but he did come up with the most relevant and accurate criticism of the three with this oneliner: “As a writer Kael tends toward logorrhea, writing as if paid by the word and starving.” He also accuses her of being “hasty, ill-considered and self-righteous,” to which the careful Kael reader might respond “Yes, no, aind sometimes.”

A more recent and most persuasive attack on Kael was made by Neal Gabler (half of the famous Gabler and Lyons Sneak Previews tag team) in the April i ’83 Monthly Detroit. Gabler argued that Kael and likeminded critics, after years of rejecting the ideals of those critics who are, in Gabler’s phrase, “lovers of culture rather than lovers of movies,” had come full circle and1 were now, themselves the oppressive establishment (or rather, in these pluralistic times, one of several oppressive establishments).

Gabler’s main example is the way Kael and cohorts kneejerkedly dismissed Sophie’s Choice, a film which, on a superficial level, conforms to the old middlebrow (and middleclass) ideas of “seriousness.” By responding to its superficial resemblance to the type of film anathema to their ideologies, the Kaelists turn a blind eye to whatever other aesthetic goodies the film might offer; Gabler’s message is that critics should loosen up—the battle’s over, it’s no longer necessary to be so tensely on guard against the creeping influence of hollow and repressive middleclass values. .

May be. But whatever side of the argument you come down on doesn’t diminish the pleasure the discerning reader can get from Kael’s writing. As with any good critic, whether or not you agree with her opinion is less important than whether or not you’re engaged by it, whether or not it makes you think (and though I’ve emphasized Kael’s pervasive scalpel-like negativity, it should be mentioned that her non-pervasive .laudatory skills are equally impressive). Since admirers and detractors alike agree that Kael tends to be a bit longwinded, this collection of capsule reviews— which, unlike most such collections doesn’t really work as a consumer’s guide unless you’re looking to avoid the goopy, the offensively holy, etc.—is a great introduction to someone who is, for better or worse, the most influential film critic to emerge during the latter half of the 20th century. After Gene Shalit, of course.

Richard C. Walls

Hungry For Those Sick Times, Baby

Edouard Dauphin

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It’s been called chic trash. It’s been compared to a walk through Bloomingdale’s vampire department. It’s been ljkened to watching MTV for 97 minutes straight on Seconals. It is, of course, The Hunger, a determinedly Stylish muddle starring Catherine Deneuve,

David Bowie and Susan Sarandon which left The Dauphin hungry for a real movie and

thirsty for the1 blood of the perpetrators of this one.

The idea of doing a visually stunning vampire movie is hardly a new one. In fact, the subject matter, with its multiple possibilities for neck gouging and prolonged blood letting seems ideal. Daughters Of Darkness, the Belgian film of about 12 years ago, and Herzog’s Nosferatu serve the genre well via flash camerawork, dazzling sets, etc.

Put if those two pictures are caviar and truffles, The Hunger amounts to little more than Ole Virginny Ham Steak.

Bowie and Deneuve are just ' another New York couple who live in a Sutton Place apartment out of the pages of Architectural Digest and who themselves are hundreds of years old. But, alas, Mr. Bowie has not been aging that well—must be all that dancing he’s been doing of late.

In fact, when he goes to the doctor, he deteriorates a good 50 years right in the waiting room. Reminded me of the last time I visited the CREEM publishing offices in search of a raise.

Faced with the imminent loss of her companion of several centuries, Deneuve goes out in search of new talent. She finds it in the person of Susan Sarandon, a doctor who specializes in accelerated aging studies. While David wastes away to a wizened stump (giving us & great idea of what the toothsome wonder will look like when his rockin’ days are through), Deneuve dawdles with Sarandon in the flick’s highly touted seduction scene, raising the question: does Susan have a rider in her contract specifying that her bazooms must be unveiled before the third reel in every movie she makes? Put them away already! We saw Atlantic pity. We saw Pretty Baby. We saw King Of The Gypsies. Put them away or get another pair!

Bowie departs for the great vampire dancehall in the sky and Deneuve carries him off to the attic to join her other ex-lovers. This garret is an interesting space, replete with coffins and excitable birds. Took The Dauph back to his first apartment in New York—bet it’s gone co-op by now.

David’s mid-film departure, recalling Janet Leigh’s exit in Psycho but minus the picturesque bathroom fixtures, is well advised—you may not even stay around as long as he does. Skip The Hunger and get yourself a good meal.

Time: Autumn, L978. Place: Orlando, Florida. The Dauph goes to Disney World—first and last time. Magic Mountain.

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Mickey Mouse’s 50th birthday, with a parade through set-like sets and Americana-like Main St. Mickey looks good for 50. Soft drinks everywhere. Junk food abounding. No alcohol—Dauph nearly dies.

That painfully sober day flashed to rpind upon viewing Something Wicked This Way Comes, Disney Studios’ well-meaning but feeble attempt to join the summer horror sweepstakes. Maybe it was the sets, which looked as phony as -the ones in Florida. Maybe it was the star, Jason Robards, who must be ‘about 50 and who reminds me a bit of Mickey Mouse. Maybe it was because I couldn’t get a drink at the Loew’s 83rd St. Threater.

Robards plays a small town librarian in turn of the century Illinois, who suspects he’s wasted his life midst dusty book shelves. His son, played by newcomer Vidal Peterson, who looks like a pint-sized version of John Denver (poor doomed kid), falls in with a sinister traveling carnival show helmed by Jonathan Pryce as a

mysterious dark clad shaman, who would like to reduce all children to slavering, sniveling slaves. (I liked this “camy man” right off.)

Pryce has a devastating effect on (he other residents of Green Town—yes, it’s really called that. A grizzled schoolmarm gets to be beautiful again. A one-legged, . one-armed barkeep gets to play football again, though the Giants probably wOuld’ve signed him as is. And a decrepit peddler is lured by a Dust Witch, portrayed by one of The Dauph’s personal favqrites, Coffy herself, Pam Grier. See, Pryce purveys dreams and it’s only a matter of tirqe before he’s offering Robards his lost youth. Not exactly ,Pam Grier, but still an interesting proposal.

Edouard tried hard to like this film; which earnestly scrambles elements of TV fare like Twilight Zone and classics such as Tom Sawyer. But the whole Disney production founders like a Daisy Duck set upon by spiteful hunters. Skip this drivel. And skip Orlando too.

The local Triplex was showing Gandhi, Sophie’s Choice and The Deadly Spawn, so, knowing The Dauphin to be a devotee of socially relevant cinema, you can guess the choice he made one recent Saturday. Spawn, reportedly spawned in the quagmires of New Jersey is an. appealing, mini-budget effort, heav.ily influenced by Alien and a brace of 1950’s monster-fromspace classics. Forget Spawn’s first 30 minutes—most of which is occupied with some nerdy guy eating eggs—and enjoy the remainder, which is gleefully preoccupied with toothy monsters (shades of Bowie yet again) eating nerdy teenagers. Only in New Jersey, right? Or maybe Western Canada.