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From: kelvin@ut-sally.UUCP (Kelvin Thompson)
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: _Pale_Rider_  (spoiler)
Message-ID: <2574@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 3-Aug-85 23:42:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.2574
Posted: Sat Aug  3 23:42:19 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 5-Aug-85 00:32:09 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 37



                            _Pale_Rider_
 
                         by Kelvin Thompson
 
 _Pale_Rider_ is bad.
 
 Mishandled grievously ... amalgam ... Eisenstein's _Old_and_New_ or
 Renoir's _Grand_Illusion_ ... shades into a meditation on the transcience
 of not so much life as existence ... an ideologically ambivalent
 dystopia.
 
 Less a devil than a walking conumdrum ... Jenny Agutter (_The_Eagle_Has_
 _Landed_, _Equus_) ... the muted rhetoric of naturalism ... supple zooms,
 pans, and tracking shots ... fascination with the tonalities of light ...
 serious new offering ... the Church is a curious and pervasive target
 here ... oddly comic pathos ... misanthropy as bold social criticism ...
 unsentimentally asserts that self-deception and paranoia are the
 accoutrements of survival ... a dispassionate mimicry ... individual
 selfhood.
 
 Or so it says.
 
 Illustration of how superfluous ... delineate its entrenchment ...
 shallow formulas ... don't add up ... misleads in suggesting a systematic
 development of story and theme ... sleekly condescending ... betrayed by
 the stage production ... beer belly ... awkwardly contrived ... degraded
 by stupid, shabby filmmaking ... exaggerated privatism.
 
 A reason is not so easy to pin down ... cannot have what it acutally
 needs ... wild Brazilian crooks ... curdled hatred and hysterical
 vengeance ... symbolic castrator ... tends to submerge the archaic ...
 destroys the viewer's confidence ... something has been demonstrated
 rather than grasped, felt, and conveyed.
 
 Mockery is still propoganda.