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When it came to voting, I wavered over this movie. At first I gave it 9/10 (fool!). Then I thought really hard, conjuring up scenes in my mind's eye and ear. I had to give it 10/10. (It's interesting that other reviewers have seen parallels with another mordant mid-60s comedy set in Southern California, "The Loved One".)
I first saw LLAD when I was 19 years old (nearly 24 years ago!), and fell in love with it immediately. To judge from some of the other reviews, it really does work a kind of magic on a suitably receptive viewer. (In this respect it resembles another cult movie, the original "Sweet November", which I didn't see until I was over 40, but still loved. Just imagine the impact that movie would have had on me when I was half that age!) Just as many people (my younger self included) felt an instant identification with Holden Caulfield in "The Catcher In The Rye", it is difficult not to feel a powerful identification with Mollymauk, in spite of (and partly because of) his strangeness.
There are many strokes of genius in this movie, several of them referred to by other IMDb reviewers. One of them was to cast a 38-year-old man, albeit a boyish one, in the role of Mollymauk. I sometimes idly speculate about what it would be like to be 17- or 18-years-old, but knowing what I know now at 42. (There was a case a few years back in my native England of a man of 32 who had posed as a teenage schoolboy in order to obtain fraudulent admission to a medical school - his thwarted ambition as an adult. Surprisingly, his deception went undetected for months!) Whether, armed with such knowledge, I could actually abide the company of ordinary youths for any amount of time is a moot point! Be that as it may, Tuesday Weld is so beautiful, that it isn't surprising that even a superior intellect like Mollymauk's is reduced to helpless adoration. (How strange and poignant to think that this young goddess metamorphosed in less than thirty years into Robert Duvall's shrewish, unlovely wife in "Falling Down"!)
Some of the hostile reviews reveal the ever-present danger of this extraordinary, unique movie being mistaken for one of the several kinds of genre movies it wickedly satirises.
score 10/10
JekyllBoote-1 20 January 2003
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0094005/ |
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15-3-2021 04:57:06