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Thanks for posting this, a delight to read.
I've always placed them with <i>The Swimmer</i> as a personal trilogy about the subject. Hope you'll enjoy them! Although "enjoy" may not quite be the word for <i>Second</i> in particular ... incredibly powerful, though.
I'd recommend <i>Seconds</i> & <i>Save the Tiger</i> as they also deal with American male midlife, the emptiness of the American Dream, and the despair of realizing that your life has been devoid of real meaning, that you bought into illusions that promised to make you happy but instead destroyed you.
There was always a thriving bohemian scene in California for decades before this film, and of course the Beats in California were the godfathers of the hippies.
I always liked her!
I don't think so at all. Midlife emptiness & despair was more than sufficient.
This, exactly. A beautifully bleak but honest look at midlife despair as the result of pursuing goals he was raised to desire & seek at the expense of his authentic self—a self he lost or surrendered long ago without truly realizing it until too late. The American Dream achieved & found to be a dull, drab, grey nightmare.
Agreed!
Agreed! Not unexpected, but still sad to hear, since Norman Lear & his work have been part of my life since I was a teenager at the end of the 1960s. Always thoughtful, insightful -and always funny before all else, finding the humor & absurdity in formerly taboo topics on TV. He had something worthwhile & important to say, but he never forgot that a TV show must be entertaining & gripping first & foremost. I never felt that I was being lectured by Norman Lear, it was more that he was simply depicting life as the viewers themselves were experiencing it, heightened just a bit for comedy, but finding the comedy in life itself.
"Old Yeller" as well.
And they do so smartly, by telling the students that it's time for an undress rehearsal, which makes them think twice. Yet they appreciate that the teachers left it up to them. Very well done!
One of the delights of this movie is how even minor characters get their chance to shine, even if it's just for a line or two. The way the drunken Santa delivers his line about the coffee, "Black ... with a little cream." The way Sawyer's secretary has picked up his twitch by working for him. And of course Mrs. Shellhammer, whose brief scene is so memorable & funny!
It's little gratuitous moments like these that make a really good movie even better.
You can do very well in school and still need a basic service job at first. Not everyone gets the job that they want or finds a good one ready & waiting for them. Some do, and good for them; but some have to struggle for a bit initially.
Even if all of this is indeed true, it doesn't change the fact that she wrote some wonderful songs, many covered by other artists, and was quite highly regarded by her songwriting peers for decades, does it? For me, <i>Illuminations</i> remains a dazzling album to this day. And a song like "Universal Soldier" is still sadly relevant.
My pleasure! :)
Discussion of timelines & timeline manipulation is utterly beside the point with this film. It's fable & parable, not science-fiction. It's one with many works of poetry & literature across the centuries in which people hear voices, see visions, and are given a mission with increasingly more difficult tasks to test their willingness & belief. In this regard, it has a lot in common with <i>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i>, as Roy Neary is similarly touched by a vision from on high & pursues it despite every obstacle in his way. Roger Ebert was right in his initial review of it: this is a religious picture, but the religion is baseball. And baseball is the framework for its story about faith & redemption for all of its characters.
It's an old-fashion bug spray. You fill it with the bug-killing liquid and pump it out in a fine mist, just as Terence is doing.
Either a troll as you say, or else someone who's so hopelessly literal that he can't understand fiction, metaphor, allegory, social commentary, satire, etc. There are people like that, after all.
I'd go to my grandparents' house after high school got out because it was closer than my own home, just to catch <i>Dark Shadows</i>. And Lara Parker was a major reason. Beautiful, seductive, so wonderfully evil, yet strangely sympathetic, with fantastic eyes you could drown in. And a really smart, fine actress as well. She was excellent in her supporting role in Jack Lemmon's Oscar winning <i>Save the Tiger</i> for instance.
Damn. Another part of my youth gone!
She might simply have said, "Who is that playing the piano?"