kelvin@ut-sally.UUCP (Kelvin Thompson) (10/05/85)
I gather from the less than tremendous response to the posting of my
(first) Movie Fun Quiz, that not too many people care, but, in the
interest of completeness, I present...
Solutions to Kelvin's (First) Movie Fun Quiz:
I. _Lenny_ is to _Star_80_
as _The_China_Syndrome_ is to _Rollover_.
II. _The_China_Syndrome_ is to _Rollover_
as _Quadrophenia_ is to _Breaking_Glass_.
Proof: The first movie in each pair is (generally) considered to be a
good, perhaps ground-breaking movie, and the second in each pair is a
poorer sequel/imitation that doesn't admit it is a sequel/imitation.
The seqel/imitations in Group I were "authorized" ripoffs of their
predecessors, and each pair in Group II had the same star.
In _Lenny_, auteur B. Fosse created a unique format to present a
fictionalized biography of a celebrity who died an early, tragic death.
Fosse showed important scenes in the life of comedian Lenny Bruce (played
by D. Hoffman), much as any film biography might, but he also intercut
staged interviews (presumably conducted after Bruce's death) with the film's
actors in character. Ten years later Fosse repeated the formula, with much
poorer results, to tell the story of Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratten,
and nobody listened. _Reds_ is another film biography which used a
variation of this format (except Beatty intercut interviews with the *real*
participants).
_The_China_Syndrome_, made by J. Fonda's production company and starring
Ms. Fonda, was a serious, realistic disaster movie which warned of a
problem facing the western world. _Syndrome_ got its message across in
spades because the disaster it described came true just as the movie was
released. Two years later Fonda starred in _Rollover_, a movie which
warned of impending disaster in the American banking system. Regrettably,
Rollover_ was less realistic and exciting than _Syndrome_, and the world
economy failed to collapse upon the movie's release. _Warning_Sign_,
released this summer, was another serious-minded (if utterly ridiculous)
disaster movie.
_Quadrophenia_, starring newcomer Phil Daniels (_The_Bride_), was an honest
movie about the British youth/rock scene (in the mid-to-late-sixties?) with
music by an honest British rock group, The Who. We saw teenage angst,
establishment hypocrisy, disillusionment. A year or two later, American
art theaters and HBO showed _Breaking_Glass_, again starring Daniels, about
the British youth/punk/new-wave scene (in the early eighties), with music
by a presumably honest new-wave songwriter, Hazel O'Connor. Again we saw
angst, hypocrisy, disillusionment, but presented much less believably. I
understand that there were a few other British rock films released at about
the same time, but I never saw any.
Informatively,
Kelvin Thompson
kelvin@sally.UTEXAS.EDU
{ihnp4,siesmo,harvard,gatech}!ut-sally!kelvin