]-HE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five [HE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five - 9 J Allen and future Ti RRUCE SHILAIN 1 " 'i, l comi:: in the mid- the 20:i century has his d fll in trying to under- _, d then describe, and en n : ke funny, much of Amer- n Reality. It stupefies, it k Ts, nd the actuality of Nix- on and Billy Graham married by some obscene preacher to the politiul destiny of the land is even a kid of embarrassment to one's own meager comic imag- Woody Allen's films and writ- s, with a lucid and high-pow- ered sense of paranoid sensibil- , are very close to articulating the atmosphere of this larger- n-life joke, and wih his new flm, Sleeper, he has integrated the best of his many talents as actor, writer, and director to create a futuristic fantasy that iaks with Chaplin's Modern Times a a comic masterpiece. The premise of his new film it mn goes into the hos- il for n uler operation and wnds up being wrapped in alum- iu and frozen for two undred years. It is this re-emer- in American culture that proides Allen's vehicle for his ieT_,gindignance about the idd ::lues prized by all ar vnd hm. Two wmnje-or nl' tion of "N partrnent ta d iiv 1 r~ r'e 'ie Henry Miller once said that "nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep. And so the gaze of a 1973 man who owned a health food store is turned upon the world two hundred years f r o m when he knew it, and the looks of it are Clockwork-Orangeish and the people act strange enough, but what has endured is the Poetry of Rod McKuen, Mc- Donald's hamburgers, etc. Just as the opening sh)t of Play It Again, Sam, was a close- up of Allen in a catatonic Bogart- induced trance, he is thrown in- to Sleeper by the doctors who revive him and allow him to stagger about the laboratory like a dishrag version of Franken- stein. It is a great opening scene, and Allen's physical gyra- tions of jelly-like helplessness while the doctors are trying to teach him to talk is -remarkably good visual comedy. In this film Allen is m o r e confident of his film-making tal- ent and allows the jokes to de- velop more easily out of the nar- rative, while before in Bananas he would fall back on his ',ril- liant one-liners, and the e n d effect was one of having been bombarded rather than brought point in the lyrics the first time in the slow version, he does it again as a rock song that stresses the great melody. But the real message is in the rollicking good-natured rock of the "cast-iron songs" and the slowly-swinging folk of the "torch ballads." "On a Night Liko This" is a great introduction with a captivating vocal, fantas- tic harmonica and The Band giving it -all sorts of incredible flourishes. "Tough Mama" is the best rocker, the kind that would be great to hear in concert, with Dylan's voice beginning with a harsh "tough mama" and ending o a "sweet beauty" with his full and flexible singing taking the listener through all the changes in between Garth Hud- son's organ and (especially) Rob- bie Robertson's guitar. "You Angel You" is a happy- go-lucky love song that really does "want to make you sing" and the wonderful "Something along as smoothly and coherent- ly as in Sleeper. But for all the evidence of Al- len's complete control over the film (he even wrote the music, jazz tunes done by the Prese.-\a- tion Hall Jazz Band from N e w Orleans), there is still the water- mark of his madness, his self- consciousness of his positio as contemporary comic, a nervous- ness in his style that parts cam- pany with Keaton or Chaplin. A great comedian of the cin- ema today could hardly be ex- pected to work with the graec'ul- ness of Chaplin or Keaton. They were reacting to a somewhat more simple set of stimuli, their fringe-of-society film per onas were innocents; their confused confrontations with the brutal world of "bullies" resembled that of the romantic immigrant who keeps a hard hold on his hu- manity during the onslaught of industrialism. Today the "brutal injustice" that former film comedians were dealing with is no matter of blacl-and-white. For the comed- ian at the fringe, there a r e hardly any firm values to up'iol:d except those of the vitality if life itself, and doesn't Allen point ;- ward this new role for the comic in Take the Money and Run when There is About You" brings back the feeling and "long forgotten' truth" of such classics as "If Not For You" and "Love Minus Zero No Limit." Planet Waves is one of the tightest and most realized re- cordings in Dylan's long and fruitful 'career. His voice and harmonica have acquired a new resonance that speakes not so much with authority as with maturity. As the lyrics stress, he has left the 60's ("I have to cut loose? Before it gets late") and is con- tent with making music and love and is confident about moving on. The Band is perfect in its sup- porting role-justifying in every way the anticipation of fans who have been long-awaiting a studio collaboration. And Dylan gets the message through-he's not the outcast, rebel, leader, cult hero or pro- phet. He's just the master musi- cian he was all along. he gives us a criminal who robs banks and manages to draw our sympathy while doing it? We are to a degree enmeshed in a morass of gargling amb&gu- ity that the comic cannot simn. plify - and part of Allen's gxn- ius is that he does not try to do so. We are vaguely aware of the sickness being within, of being somehow polluted or derailed by having our real allegiances hid- den by our profusion of opinions, as in the bitter cartoons of Jules Feiffer. Woody. Allen is perpetually ul luding to this psychological ganig- mire when he puts his finger on the particular schizophrenia of counter-cultural oblivion, as welea he alludes to a girl he used to know who "used to be a Trotsky- ite but changed into a Jesus freak and was arrested for selling por- nographic literature in the Vil- lage." Norman Mailer speaks in Exist- ential Errands of the gray col- lective soul of the room after an evening of TV, and leads the way towards a vague indictment of the media for "robbing is of something": "Emotions are mod - ulated (rather say: strangled, fil- tered, choked) while passing through the electronic waves of the transmitter and the, set. Something leaves us each night we spend in attendance on the box." Pop culture w h i c h rules the roost on giant screens in Sleep- er, plays with meanings in d emotions until words themselves are emptied of their value, as Allen comically portrayed in the endless intimacies of conversa- tion he would have with Louise Lassen in Bananas - "I know you love me," she would say, "but do you love me?" T h e contemporary experience of love has to get behind the society's constrictions, even behind the words themselves, behind the empty chatter that Allen satiriz- es in Sleeper in his abrupt ,cut from the chattering teeth cf th . joke-shop to a shot of Nixon speaking. What has "left" the character that Woody Allen is continually portraying is his sense of sell, which has been absorbed by the Giant Sponge of Culture. He is Society's Child gone mad, w h o believes the adages and gim- micks so thoroughly that wheni informed in Sleeper that ever!- one he ever knew has been dead over one hundred years, he ex- claims that "it's impossible, they all ate organic rice." In Sam, he was the lovabl a schnook who believed everything the movies told him, and his in- sistence on living with Bogart G A U. as his alter-ego doomed him to failure with women, until of course he mutters the lines trom Casablanca at the finish with the fog swirling and break; the curse, for we must recognize the enemy, make our delusions con- scious, and this is the essene of Allen's great comedy. - '.Y (y: .. 4 .. A _ «~ k.h.. sue! ,_,, f ' It looks like a bootl g. But ats more thani a basemnt tp x three-day scssion witPh 'F h Ba Bob Dylan's fIrst release on a new label, Pianet Wave's (Asylm r 7E-10031, is the reel tigast of ten new songs Pha. ari q. t possibly the mnos sig2iian t have come out in the 72 s This is lreydeiv D\ In os t 'is frs s r b I he ftsis i 'h written si ce ohW .y -- ing he takes us starting po i"a humoros causl s career and thi g'r li mnains tssi:f port thow o tn ~n least for of tesi', e1 directly or partially ad1 > listener adin the la ons I' ~1 'I *~ I''- 11 s e1to us that "I hate myself ani', fou And the weakness t howed You were just a fur pated face On a trip down r suicide road." .' I ', - ', " . I "' is rIn.. ~. t ,. , * . ~!11 1' 50 '' u he other 'folk" song, We Song is the flip side f tat coin. ie exaults in the true love for his wife that is his on personal salvation with such at ies as "I love you more than blood and the two that end he album: "I love you more t a ever Now that the past is "Forever Young'' is Dylan's ollimate recognition of and recon- ciliation with, his audience: "May God bless and keep you always/May your wishes all come true . May you stay forever young. . Woody Allen There is, however, the hint that there is no core of reality at the bottom of his comic nightmares. In Take The Money, he insisted to the end on thinking of him- self as a gangster, and in Sleep- er's finest segment, he is given a serum to counteract the condi- tioning of the Dictatorsho a n d plunges into a dreamlike rendi- tion of Blanche Dubois. The ;m- age of the Tennessee Williams play working itself out along the lower layers of the Allen psyche, while he adopts the posture of the aging Southern belle, is vintage Allen. Allen's comic descent into the perverse undercurrent beneath the plastic reality provided the material for Everything You Al- ways Wanted to Know About Sex in which Reuben's book is attack-- ed on the grounds of its ridicul- ous pretensions to shape sexual attitudes in the casual fun-read- ing-cutesy style that is such a sickening insult. The film includ- ed a gamey daytime sh )w call d "What's My Perversion?" on which the guest of the day a rabbi) has his sexual fantasies fulfilled. His indictment of Reuben was most explicit in the segment about the Italian director whose wife cannot enjoy sex unless it is done in public, setting off a series of bizarre enz,)unters at cocktail parties and in the Zal- lery of a museum. It presages the treatment of hlock sex in Sleeper, in whic:a couples merely use the orgasnatr a to- gether, since every woman is frigid in the B. F. Skinnerian nightmare of the future. Much of the serial satire in Everything, if it was funny, was vi.-ous-fun- ny, Lenny Bruce-fun iy, and it is obviously not Allen's metier. In the new film he has returned to an exploration of his own character, and produced a great film. Like Groucho, a ma:er of the one-liner, the jibes are directed inward, and hardly ever to insult as were most of Grousho a best moments. No, the ego of a Field- ing Mellish is a most fragile one, and he makes 'ne always aware that he nows ne is alone, as in Take the Money when the prison break was callJ3 off, but he did not hear about it an'd wound up by himself in the court- yard with the .convicts taughing at him inside. Somehow, though, he is always caught u.,)iii the, intrigue of politics and revolu- tions, never with any convictions except to Get the Girl, played again in Sleeper by .Diane Kea- ton. For on the one hand is the famous Allen reluctance. He does not want to get involved in the revolutionary movement because he says he cannot stand torture, he always talks; sim'.larly, in the last episode of Everything, the reluctant sperm cell (Allen) is having second though's about leaving his home in the penile space-capsule. And on the other hand is his reckless sexual aban- don, his boundless eae:gy, all while wheezing asthmatically and crying for help. And the whole jbusiness is lent an oversized importance by his messianic complex (remember the dream sequence from Ban- onas?), which surfaces in Sleep- er, making him, freckled and hesitant, the savior of the Ideal, which is to Allen, as he reveals in closing, his belief in sex and death, the distinction being that after death "you're not naus- eous." The hurried sweep of the storyline gives us the feeling that something fast, if not ur'gent, i' developing, like Allen's line from Everything in which he plays the court jester and says he must hurry because soon "the Renais- sance will be here and everyone will be painting." If life is a tragedy to those that feel and a comedy to those that think, then Allen is a comic thinker of the first rank who still manages to feel, to remain ?ot- ally vulnerable, and that touches all the bases, as well as his aud- ience. Sleeper is, well, it's the best comedy film Hof the last few years. at s; bL lie even subtlely reminds one GCno" such soups as 'mvowin' in t'he ind" a.d ''The Times They Are A' Changin' '' in the line 'm 'one "day you have a strong founda- Wthe winds of changes ve, con- shif " And if we didn't get the h 4 ,T -N iff it ; i . l F r fi r u c t art: Ib seous mas terworks By ROBERT SCHETTER An Arbor has lng been a cul- ural han. The city has hosted pi ms l musical greats, we s offering top quality land inema. What is not kmwn is that Ann Ar- S s lo ben a great center o itig and sculpture. The city boasts ownership of ScI world renowned master- ieces, he by some to be the epitome of the recent Babaist tradition. Ao do't rush over to the University Museum because S 'tfi nd them there. In fact, these monumental works an befoundJ in only the isunlikely places: behind al- inistration buildings, blocking your way to class, destroying a lae of natural beauty, placed ver treets bl>cking out the sun d , and so on. What are they Vaking structures. atures, despite it probably wil be reader dis- j woval, by all means can be con- ered works of art. They fit the usul a4hetic criteria of n, character and dimension, wel a eliciting the oft heard _sion from art viewers: "Why e hel was that done!?" And wen you take into account the fact that the structures look tot- So of lace no matter where yare plced, one sees that s far from the I- t readymades of the early be made clear that the Ba-it tradiin from which il e Srcures came is a direct de- sdnt of adaism. The differ- cuceis hatBabism tries notl onlyjtoplay jokes on the mu- scu por ard the middcla , bton everyone. As mu n, 'a- .i'ed rcady-niades'' of th>; peur' '.r awas funnd wheae ])eople litct be an try to Sniae te ty funny, wouldn't you say? Ann Arbor is unique in that strictures of other cities have not worked artistically. Mainly these others have been geare l to blend in with their environments and often are disguised from view. In short, they w ere func- tional. And this was their proolem, as no one knew they were parking structures. Things were s: ?bal that one man walked int') a strtlc- ture and bought out the ground level, thinking it to be a Wool- worth's. But the founding fathecs of our great city thought better of these failures and called in the world reknowned Babaist, Matell Da- Chimp, to design strucu. es lit- ting to Ann Arbor. No disguises and coverings for the public. Let them know what they are getting for their taxes! Besides, the imagery of little cars ceaselessly entering d a r k building portals they found both lewd and disgusting. The result was the uncovered, co0nintusly lit structures which we find now, entitled by the artist: Barely Concrete. At present there are between six and eight of the Barely Con- crete components in Ann Arbor, the last one built being of a fer- ris wheel variety, located next to St. Joseph's Hospital. It was figured that to help keep the hospital in Ann" Arbor one would have to keep the Hospi- tal's beds full. So the ferris wheel structure was originally de- signed to take both drive" and car to the top and then dump them. This plan had to be ditch- ed when they could not figure out how to get the cages back down after being relieved of their contents. Future plans? It is reported that plans are now being readied for a Spring structure. This Spring structure, unlike others of its kind, will be in operatioa the whole year and use real springs. Thus it is necessary to have a minimum number of cars on each tier to keep the structure from collapsing, thus s.lnash- ing all cars and people into pancake-like objects, wi in turn would be served at any of Ann Arbor's fine restaurants. A fine compliment to any meal, indeed! Daily Photo by KAREN KASMAUSKI "'CHLOE i !' i f ' 1 i IN THE AFTERNOON' IS DAZZLING! A mature, immensely entertaining movie!" -WI LLIAM WOLF, Cue "Rohmer's thloe' is beautiful! "Rohm Extraordinarily alive! A con- of very stant pleasure to watch!" tradictio --ARCHER WINSTEN, word, i N.Y. Post inensely "Ag.ow' with atmosphere and ambience. Beautiful cinema- e