Mediatrics
Presents:
(rberf Ross) Shirley Maclaine and Anne Bancroft portray ballerinas who
have taken different directions' in their lives and later confront themselves
about the choices they made years ago. Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie
rown also appear as ballet dancers.
Fri. April 6 Nat Sci Aud 7:00, 9:15
STEPPENWOLF
(Fred Haines) Max Von Sydow stars in the title role as a loner who is torn
between bourgeois respectibility and his wolfish impulses. Based on the
novel by Herman Hesse.
Sat, April 7mNat Si Aud 7:00,8:45,10:30
admission $1.50
.':$ >
F'UHeld Over!
.1 " " H1 Held Over!
FRI & SAT SUN'
7:30 & 9:30 5:30, 7:30,
& 9:30
NOMINATED FORU
ACADEMY AWARDS
BEST PCURE
BEST ACTOR BEST DIRECTOR
WARREN JULIE JAMES [c
BEATTY CHRISTIE MASON
he Ann Arbor Film Cooperative presents at MLB 3
FRIDAY, APRIL 6
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS
WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX,
BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK
(Woody Allen, 1972) 7 & 10:20-MLB 3
The perfect parody of pop psych, Dr. Rubin's book, and movies themselves.
EVERYTHING takes hilarious shots at Italian neo-realism, schlock horror films,
notorious army training films, and the sexual misinformation we all learned
behind the swings. Manic, messy, and marvelous. Stars WOODY, JOHN
CARRADINE, LYNN REDGRAVE, LOUISE LASSER, and LOU JACOBI.
WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY?
(Senkichi Tanizuchi and Woody Allen, 1966) 8:40 only-MLB 3
A Japanese agent named Phil Moscowitz (l) searches for a stolen formula of
the perfect egg salad sandwich. What happens next is anybody's guess, as
Woody Allen gives the gold finger to the James Bond epic in this hilarious
jumble of a movie (a real Japanese thriller which Allen rewrote and redubbed).
Allen's most anarchistic film, with some of his best one-liners.
Tomorrow: Kubrick's FATHER OF GLORY
& THE KILLING
Page 6-Friday, April 6, 1979-The Michigan Daily
0arts entertainment
Hair':
BY ANNE SHARP
I never thought that the musical Hair
would ever make it to the big screen. It
would be niee; so far, not one decent
film has been made about the hippie
era, and Hair, although it was no
sociological document, had a lot of the
look and feel to it of the "tune in, turn
Bounce but n
on, drop out" generation. Certainly it
captured its music (several of Galt
MacDermott's songs written for the
play became Top Forty hits) and its
sardonic, drug-inspired sense of humor
(e.g., "Marijuana is nature's little way
of saying "Hi!").
But Hair like Godspell or A Chorus
Treat Williams makes like Bariyshnikov amongst the wine and the finger-
bowls, disrupting a ritzy New York dinner party, in a scene from Milos For-
man's "Hair."
FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT'S 5977
SMALL CHANGE
A precocious 3-year old pushes the family cat out the window;
a teenager is infatuated with his best friend's mother; two
brothers sell a classmate's hair-a few of fhe humorous (and
ultimately human) but eloquent and sincere depiction of the
world of children in a small French village.
SAT: Ann Arbor Premiere of Mikhalkov's SLAVE OF LOVE
SUN: Polanski's REPULSION
CINEMA GUILD 700&90 T OLD ARCH $150
Line, was a theatre piece, constructed
around bits of stage business which
would never translate to the cinema.
Besides the rather meagre bits of plot
which held together the play, which is
really no more than an assortment of
songs and vignettes, would .hardly
sustain a two-hour film.
Nevertheless someone, somewhere
along the way decided that Hair must
become a film, A screenplay writer fir-
st of all junked the play's stagy script.
Next, he selected about half of Galt
MacDermott's Sixties musical num-
bers and had them Dolbyized to take
out their rough sound, then selected the
names of a few of the play's major
characters and made up a new story
around them. The result, Hair: the
Film, directed by Milos Forman, bears
no resemblance whatsoever to Hair the
musical, or to the Sixties for that mat-
ter. It is a cinematic sitcom, pure and
simple, in its own right.
CLAUDE HOOPER-BUKOWSKI, the
cool, rock star-like blond glamor boy of
the stage play, has become Claude
Bukowski, a stereotypical hayseed with
a buzz cut, who arrives in the big city a
few days before being inducted into the
army. He runs across a group of
strangely-dressed young persons in the
park doing what looks like an elegant,
sinuous version of the Freaky Deaky
(choreography is by Twyla Tharp, who
alsohas a small role as a priestess in
Claude's acid dream later on). Claude,
for some unexplainable reason, decides
to spend his lastfree hours hanging
around these shiftless creeps.
He sees a rich girl riding a horse, and
falls tn love with her. In a scene straight
out df the worst sort of French comedy,
lead shiftless creep Berger (Treat
Williams), no relation to the witty
madman of Hair the play, suggestswthat
they crash the girl's coming-out party.
They do, annoyingly, and are thrown in
jail.
From then on, the hijinks come along
fast and furious, and so do the songs.
Taken out of their original context, the
lyrics of such songs as "Sodomy" or
"Ain't Got No" or "Where Do I Go?"
have no particular meaning. The actors
toss them aside as they prance
maniacally about the screen; they are
background noise, that's all.
THE LYRICS still deal with social
R.C. Players
presents:
BETWEEN
WOMEN:
FACES OF
FRIENDSHIP
April 5,6, 7-$2'
E.Quad -8pm
Sbody
issues of the sixties - drugs, politics,
the War, race relations - but the film
does not really make use of this. As a
matter of fact, it does not bother to ex-
plain who Berger and company are, or
why they choose to burn their draft
cards and live in the park.
When Hair was first staged, there
was no need to explain who the hippies
onstage were, or their value system,
because hippies were a common
phenomenon; a few hippie panhandlers
probably accosted audience members
on their way to the theatre. The hippies
were frustrated with bourgeoise, con-
formist life, and they refused to fight in
a war which they considered wasteful
and immoral.
BERGER AND company, in the film,
seem to behave as they do for the sheer
hell of it. True, one character does mut-
ter something about "cosmic con-
sciousness," and a sarcastic Berger
makes, for him, a strenuous, eloquent
effort to talk the rustic. jerk Bukowski
(Lord knows why) out of complying
with the draft board: "What's the mat-
ter? You have to be a big macho man
with a gun?"
T here is no attempt to recreate the
Sixties visually. (I have mentioned how
the acid rock music of the original has
been processed until it sounds like
tracks off the latest Toto album.) One of
the characters drives what- is un-
mistakably a 1978Olds. The clothes,
especially those of the ingenue, Beverly
D'Angelo, are straight out of last year's
pattern books.
HERE IS an interesting contrast
between musical and film: When the
play came out in 1967, audiences were
shocked and outraged by the now
notorious "nude scene" at the end of
Act I. By today's standards, the scene
was tame; a few actors stood nude on a
darkened stage, with a strobe light
flashing across their bodies, for a grand
total of 60 seconds. In Hair: the Film,,
actors doff their clothes constantly, on
the flimsiest excuses.
Supporters of Hair the musical
argued that nudity was essential to the
dramatic intent of the scene, and so it
was, giving touching emphasis to the
words of the song that accompanied it:
"Why do I live? Why do I die? Where do
I go?" The nudity in the film, however,
is gleeful, unabashed gratuitousness,
and the audience accepts it with
slightly bored elan.
We've come a long way, I suppose,
from our prudish ancestors who caused
such an uproar when John and Yoko
appeared bare-bottomed on the cover of
Two Virgins. Even such a sedate artist
as Judy Collins can do a nude album
cover nowadays, and there's hardly a
murmur of protest.
HAIR: THE FILM is an amusing lit-
tle comedy caper on the order of Con-
voy or Heaven Can Wait, and light en-
tertainment like that is catnip to
children of the seventies. But anyone
who can still remember the sixties with
a clear, nostalgic vision, who ever ex-
perignced the excitement of the stage
play when it was new and meaningful,
who ever really knew what the hippie
movement was all about, will be em-
barrassed and disappointed by the film.
My advice: Stay at home, put on your
love beads and bell-bottomed jeans,
settle into a nice, comfy chair, light up
a reefer, and listen to the original cast
album of Hair through a good set of
headphones. It's the best way to let the
sunshine in.
Lq
N
I
All Ladies
come and get your
Bananas T-shirts
*
U
"
"
* "
" "
GO BANANAS
SUNDAY AND MONDAY
NIGHT!
Announcing
Second Grand Opening
Sunday, April 8th and Monday, April 9th
will be the Second Grand Opening .
of the most exciting Disco in town. If you thought
the past Bananas' was exciting come see the
NEW BANANAS.
Featuring * A new enlarged sound system
* * Records to your request