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The whole college megillah ca. 1970, with basketball as the metaphor ("to you it's poetry, to me it's staying after school in your underwear"). Courtside slow-mo against darkened backgrounds introduces the athletes, the action turns grainy on a TV screen watched by guerilla theater members, raptly reciting the poem that gives the film its title. The star player (William Tepper) is a placid jock undergoing a mid-championship crisis, wondering whether to go pro when not humping the faculty wife (Karen Black). The riotous yin to Tepper's stolid yang is his roommate (Michael Margotta), a jumpy mass of agit-prop antics who stages anti-Vietnam War mock-executions (complete with the Stars and Stripes popping out of a toy pistol), almost pukes on the Army psychiatrist, thrashes his dorm with a samurai sword, and generally spits on "the rah-rah jive number" the coach (Bruce Dern) holds sacred. "Tear the mother down, man!" Jack Nicholson's Counterculture Campus is a loose, fractured, jangly locale: Henry Jaglom demands to be imprisoned along with the protesters, Robert Towne lends an Osbornian note as Black's abstracted husband, hoop shots are crosscut with sexual assault. The student body and its dreams, youthful unrest and the draft's many forms, the games people play in and out of the gymnasium. Handheld shots and graphic matches are prevalent, a variety of works (La Chinoise, Medium Cool, Downhill Racer) are cited. Tepper recedes into himself in a Magritte image while Margotta enacts a most tranquil freak-out, naked in a classroom with the reptiles and insects he's just freed. "I'm right and I'm sane," the closing view is from the back of a departing ambulance. With Michael Warren, June Fairchild, David Ogden Stiers, and Cindy Williams.
--- Fernando F. Croce |