THE DAILY BARBARIAN supplement
FIFTH ESTATE, #298, June 19, 1979
THE DEAR HUNTERS: Won Academy Awards for harmlessly flaying events five years after they took place. Demonstrates Hollywood’s ability to make recent events appear never to have happened. Robert DeNormal, Jacque Strapp.
BATTLESTAR LAXATIVE: Like walking through a shopping mall holding coke bottles over your eyes. Acting is terrible…some great underwater scenes, however. Lorne Goon.
DAWN OF THE DEAD: Sensitive film explores subtleties of transitory existence. Raw anthropological data, tender and ripe portrayals of character.
ANIMAL HOUSE: A bunch of rich kids get their rocks off before the inevitable leap into corporate worlds. They get thrown out of college, wreck it, then get their parents to buy them a new one. John Bologna.
WARRIORS: What happens when Jesus Freaks, on a picnic on Belle Isle, stumble into a Hare Krishna circle jerk which is being crashed by followers of the Ayatollah Khomeni.
GREASE: A prediction of what life will be like in the 1980’s.
CALIFORNIA SUITE: America’s best-known playwright shows what it takes to convert mundane and trivial social situations into mundane and trivial theatre. Neil Simon hired Jane Fonda for this one to make us think he cares about social problems. Don’t bother with the copywright next time fella, save the bucks.
CHINA SYNDROME: A career girl with a new hairdo (Jane Fonda), to impress her superiors, tries to shovel shit all the way to China. When she discovers a hidden stash of disposed Plutonium she is paid to shut-up and put in charge of a whole office of young, masochistic office girls.