Monday, January 24, 2005

Carnal Knowledge

It all holds up pretty well -- Jules Feiffer’s barbed if sketchy dialogue, Mike Nichol’s knowing and inventive direction, Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel as the two sex-crazed buddies who fail to mature as they move from postwar Amherst to Kennedy-era New York to the brink of the Me Decade, Candice Bergen and Ann-Margret as roadkill in the path of these cockhound hotrodders, who still get to assert their own pungent personalities. The humor of the college scenes is biting but ingratiating, timeless adolescent angst, but the bitter tone of succeeding episodes bespeaks an era of gender war, which may not be over but is certainly at a different stage these days. (1971, dvd, r.) *8-*

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