And, man, it's a drag. You dig?
No spoiler alerts needed here. No action takes place in this ham-handed movie (unless the popping of a boil passes for action), and even worse, there's no character development - not unless you count the back story of the abused farmer's son, which isn't worth counting.
It's cliché, too. Cowboy, the drug dealer, is a stereotypical one - glib, cynical and sinister. At least, he's supposed to be all of those things. But movie fans have seen them done far better by Ricardo Montalban in LET NO MAN WRITE MY EPITAPH and Darren McGavin in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, the latter being a movie infinitely superior to this untalented Beat waste of celluloid.
Speaking of WAITING FOR GODOT, let me pass along the true point of that bizarre exercise in futility. (These thoughts aren't my own - I take them from a brilliant article which I read years ago in the Encyclopedia Britannica.) Samuel Becket's inspiration goes back to what Aristotle said about tragedy, that its allure is in the relief, the catharsis, which one feels after viewing horrifying events on the stage. So Becket decided to give playgoers a relief from their own humdrum, pointless existence by depicting futility rather than tragedy. In other words, the play isn't merely a statement about the modern age - it's an anodyne for it.
A similar dynamic is at work in THE CONNECTION, and that's practically its only redeeming feature - escaping it is such a relief!
Admittedly, THE CONNECTION's single set, a rundown apartment, is convincing; however, the effect is spoiled by the lack of changing shadows outside the windows, and more so by the absence of sirens from police cruisers and fire engines, an omnipresent fact of life in Manhattan.
Finally, as a side note, light doesn't travel at "186,000 miles per second per second." Per-second-per-second is a unit of acceleration, not velocity. Hopefully, the playwright was aware of this fact when he put those words into Leach's mouth, but I suspect otherwise. The Beats were never much on science, however much they may have liked to riff about it while high.
No spoiler alerts needed here. No action takes place in this ham-handed movie (unless the popping of a boil passes for action), and even worse, there's no character development - not unless you count the back story of the abused farmer's son, which isn't worth counting.
It's cliché, too. Cowboy, the drug dealer, is a stereotypical one - glib, cynical and sinister. At least, he's supposed to be all of those things. But movie fans have seen them done far better by Ricardo Montalban in LET NO MAN WRITE MY EPITAPH and Darren McGavin in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, the latter being a movie infinitely superior to this untalented Beat waste of celluloid.
Speaking of WAITING FOR GODOT, let me pass along the true point of that bizarre exercise in futility. (These thoughts aren't my own - I take them from a brilliant article which I read years ago in the Encyclopedia Britannica.) Samuel Becket's inspiration goes back to what Aristotle said about tragedy, that its allure is in the relief, the catharsis, which one feels after viewing horrifying events on the stage. So Becket decided to give playgoers a relief from their own humdrum, pointless existence by depicting futility rather than tragedy. In other words, the play isn't merely a statement about the modern age - it's an anodyne for it.
A similar dynamic is at work in THE CONNECTION, and that's practically its only redeeming feature - escaping it is such a relief!
Admittedly, THE CONNECTION's single set, a rundown apartment, is convincing; however, the effect is spoiled by the lack of changing shadows outside the windows, and more so by the absence of sirens from police cruisers and fire engines, an omnipresent fact of life in Manhattan.
Finally, as a side note, light doesn't travel at "186,000 miles per second per second." Per-second-per-second is a unit of acceleration, not velocity. Hopefully, the playwright was aware of this fact when he put those words into Leach's mouth, but I suspect otherwise. The Beats were never much on science, however much they may have liked to riff about it while high.