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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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032089
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03208900.002
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1990-09-17
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CINEMA, Page 73Funky Funk
SLAVES OF NEW YORK
Directed by James Ivory
Screenplay by Tama Janowitz
They should have filmed Tama Janowitz's publicity campaign. It
was a lot more entertaining, and possibly more sociologically
edifying, than Slaves of New York, the collection of short stories
about the downtown art scene that book flacks so heedlessly hyped
to bestsellerdom. Alas, the movie people got stuck with the book
and with its author as screenwriter. And now the public is stuck
with a movie that compares rather unfavorably to periodontal work
in amusement value.
Sustained, coherent narrative is not, shall we say, Janowitz's
great strength, and neither is dramatic characterization. Eleanor
(the normally perky, cuddly Bernadette Peters in sadly deflated
condition) is a designer of funky hats who suffers from a possibly
justifiable weakness of the ego. She lives with a graffiti artist
named Stash (Adam Coleman Howard) who has a definitely unjustified
air of superiority. Before they finally break up, this tedious pair
go to many noisy parties and performance-art evenings. Along the
way, art-world fights, flirtations and fornications are noted but
not explored in a script that is always lumbering off up aimlessly
false trails. Indeed, many characters are written so dimly that it
is often hard to tell one from the other.
The fault is not entirely Janowitz's. Her only hope was to find
a director who could either respond avidly to the sexual and
creative energies of the avant-garde scene or take a satirical
cudgel to it. Instead, she drew distant, enervated James Ivory (A
Room with a View, Heat and Dust, The Bostonians), who never seems
to engage fully with any subject he has tackled and who has never
been more fastidiously withdrawn than he is here. In this case,
however, audiences will be well advised to follow his example.