Newspapers / Daily Tar Heel (Chapel … / Feb. 3, 1978, edition 1 / Page 11
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Friday, February 3, 1978 Weekender 3 Women's films have reached a 'Turning Point' You will have heard by now a number of superlatives on Diane Keaton's performance in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. And currently in town there is the film Turning Point, with an equally touted performance by Anne Bancroft. Predictable result? A media face-off between Keaton and Bancroft for the Best Actress awards. But how the intelligentsia rage! Pious statements will come from every quarter that competition is meaningless, you can't compare apples with oranges, it's all political anyway you get their drift, liberally. I don't think the intelligentsia has ever forgiven Hollywood for the Best Actor Oscar to John Wayne. I have a sneaking suspicion that those who pooh-f ooh honest competition all movies By J ERE LINK- The Turning Point Looking For Mr. Goodbar made Bs and Cs, never won the swim meets, always made second-chair third clarinet in band and in general consider advancement on the basis of merit somehow inhuman. There is an old Darwinian rule worth resurrecting at this point: that you can't criticize a game until you've won at it. If the game is not rigged, there's no use (and no honor) in giving excuses, playing spoilsport or trying to sabotage the game altogether. The rule seems to hold sway still not only in the Academy Awards but in the movies themselves. Not to mention in real life. In Turning Point competition is the very crux: Bancroft huge success; MacLaine successful mother with nagging doubts that she could have beaten Bancroft at her own game. They compete for the love of MacLaine's breezily successful daughter. Baryshniicov weaves in and out of the plot as the consummate male dancer and stud. What a host of cliches underlies all this! Overnight success, being above competition, being painfully past competition and (less of a cliche) not being allowed io fault a game after you have voluntarily left it. All these issues are thrown up in the movie (no double entendre), but the gravity of art doesn't bring them back down. There's also a fairy-tale sort of denouement that no male dancers are fairies, it seems. Association of International Students Presents Fine musical entertainment February 16 8:00 p.m. Memorial Hall Tickets available at the Carolina Union Bancroft as the seasoned winner is more believable than MacLaine's supermom, though neither is free from cliche or artifice of character. And MacLaine seems to play the same character here that she has played since her Oscar-winning kept-woman in The Apartment (1960). Bancroft has a better range; whether of roles or talent, it's hard to say. Looking for Mr. Goodbar is no fairy tale. And the opposite of success has never looked so unpleasantly real. Keaton plays an Irish-Catholic woman and successful teacher of hearing impaired children. But don't forget that S-shaped spine of yore, or her sister who "pees perfume," or her stereotypic louse of a father or her bastard, first-lover. How is a lapsed Catholic woman to cope with all this? This one makes all the wrong choices, the last of which is tragically bad. She mixes with all the wrong people; she finds her Irish suitor deadly dull and old-fashioned, though he would have been a wiser choice than the one she ends up making. And, most unfortunately, she meets a guy who cannot take one more ego-deflating failure, and Keaton inadvertently provides the proverbial back-breaking straw. Goodbar has more to say about success failure, and it is well said. Some will not find the naturalistic approach here very congenial, but you can't gainsay the power of both Keaton's performance and this complex, refreshingly adult film. , Turning Point says more about competition, but it seems a very much lesser film. It is enjoyable and can make even the most diehard hater of classical music fall in love with the ballet. ! - ' - n. ; ' I 1 ; V . -. - i - y 1' ' I s j I x if v I $ ;V!.;, ,,,.0 .. .. ' . lW V I ' - "" ' : C y , . ... .- --,...:." --' . il . L ;T.rrr-l..11, l itiig- ' , r - ' Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft are Deedee and Emma in The Turning Point. The critics seem hard pressed to figure out the most likely candidate for Best Actress honors Bancroft, MacLaine, or Diane Keaton, who gives a compelling performance in Mr. Goodbar. rhTol Va)VOO (TWC hi a a f Kn now SnnUi omws. snmfi thiners chance and some things don't. Good ol' boys keep what's good and change what's not. Their Rebel Yell is very, very good-defi- mtely a keeper. Folks in other parts have to play finders keepers for this fine bourbon is made and sold only beneath the Mason-Dixon line. Southerners drink to that. Drink to that with Rebel Yell, host bourbon of the South. Even though pea nuts have been around the South for a long time, they have been heavily publi cized only recently. f 8 E a: isii , O Clf$pr 1 U FIFTH J CODE Afmnum. 123 Watermelon can preserve you in the sum mer or you can preserve it for the winter. r ,. VV1 V. Catfish are among the more homely fish but are beautiful with hush puppies and Rebel Yell. REbrtVyelL J5?E DEEP SOtfTtf ISCi!g DEEP SQ 90 Proof-Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey. THE GOOD OL' BOYS' EOUBBON,
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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Feb. 3, 1978, edition 1
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