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Show Page B6 Thursday, April 1, 1982 The Newspaper Communications Dry ir ' c i-ij-j- Seminar Does that certain person upset you? Are you afraid to speak to one particular individual? These and other issues will be delved into in a four part seminar April 7, 8, 14 and 15 at Prospector Square Convention Center from 7 -10 p.m. The purpose of this seminar is to give you the tools to communicate effectively with everyone in your life. by Rick Brough Registration Wed. April 7th Prospector Square Conference Center 6 - 6:45 p.m. Contact Bob Wilkinson For further information 649-6421 days 649-7387 evenings Ideas in 'Personal Best' don't go the distance , A Classic Recommended Good double-feature double-feature material Time-killer For masochists . only f f III!, !I!Sn W AT PARE CITY The "LYNN DEE MUELLER BAND" I Country Rock I Thurs. April 1st - Sat. April 3rd 9-1 II Rock with The WHIZ KIDS Tues. April 6th - Sat. April 10th 9 -1 Located at the Resort Plaza Happy Hour 8-9 649-3500 lz Personal Best In "Personal Best", written writ-ten and directed by Robert Towne, the stars of the movie are muscles and sweat. His view of athletics and athletes is heavy and portentous, contrasted at times with casual raunchi-ness, raunchi-ness, daring, and good subtle performances from the supporting sup-porting stars. The result is a movie that grips you, but not consistently. consis-tently. There seem to be three or four themes floating around in the picture, but nothing ties them down-certainly down-certainly not Mariel Hemingway's Hem-ingway's weak central performance. per-formance. Hemingway plays Chris McCall, a young track aspirant aspir-ant who is devastated after flubbing the Olympic track trials in 1976. By chance, she finds comfort with an older star, Tori Skinner (Patrice Donnelly) and their friendship friend-ship drifts into a lesbian love affair, while Tori convinces her Olympic coach (Scott Glenn) to help the younger girl develop herself. What you've got here is a little of the old "Star is Born" plot (the old pro in love with the rising star) and "The Competition" (two Follow the bouncing ball to the new Nick law designed championship course at Parte Meadows, and we II give you a free golf ball signed by rhe Golden Bear himself The course, surrounded and Intertwined by Fairway village condominiums and custom designed luxury homes (with furnished models open dairy 1 incorporates the ultimate lifestyle offered in Park City. The new Nicklaus at Park Meadows'bring your clubs. The first ball s on us. HOIlOP IW PARK Ml WW- HAIA , , I "' s "' 1 t iiiQn1 y iAIXSOMIU ' U -r- J - -"I j'j PWiMtAOOWi V-BACOUET AWV.UAC.I ' OUUIOUKU 1 CLUB Open house daily. Listed through Gump and Ayers Real Estate. Inc. : Park Meadows Plaza. Park City. Utah 84060 801 649550. Park Meadows iaes Office: P.O. Box 400. Park City, Utah 84060 (801)649-2345. PARK MEADOWS "'6in people fall in love amid a contest that both brought them together and threatens to split them apart). Hemingway is a big problem prob-lem here. She is physically unimpressive with a faint, little voice. In "Manhattan", director Woody Allen played against that. The little girl Hemingway was more mature ma-ture in some ways than he was. But "Personal Best" begins be-gins with Hemingway by emphasizing her youth, and how fragile and confused she is. Hemingway looks so weak and whiny that you're repulsed re-pulsed by her. In moments of distress, she's been directed to really turn on the waterworks, water-works, and her efforts to do so look like grade-school theatrics. It's hard to believe that later on she becomes a strong person, partly through Tori's help and partly through her own character. When she arm-wrestles arm-wrestles Tori, Chris is suddenly sud-denly all rock-hard determination. determi-nation. Where did that come from? (She says she picked up the skill by arm-wrestling her brothers, but for all we can see, she is cowed by her family, especially the father who pushes her at a field and track.) The question becomes: be-comes: Will Chris' development develop-ment as a top competitor endanger her relationship with Tori? We really don't care much, because we aren't emotionally involved with Chris. The one we care about more is Tori. Athlete Patrice Donnelly, gives a marvelous performance in her acting debut. Towne's movie concerns con-cerns itself a lot with the link between physical performance perform-ance and human feeling. Donnelly embodies the idea, because her physical determination deter-mination and her love-making love-making both seem to grow out of her emotions, easily and naturally. When she's hurt, she doesn't let it out. But you can see when her strength is weakening in a wary look, or at a team party where she becomes suddenly bullish. Another complex characterization charac-terization comes from Scott Glenn as Coach Tingloff. His brusque respect for his charges is mixed with condescending con-descending regret that he never got to coach a football team. His attempts to douse the Chris-Tori love affair is a practical effort to keep them both at an athletic peak, but it's also motivated by desire for Chris. This love and war is serious stuff, Towne tells us. In bed, his lesbian lovers gleam like statues in the golden-brown light. On the track, the muscles, arms and legs are great machines. Nothing is too small to focus on here the movie starts with a huge close-up of drops spattering the ground, which is shown to be the sweat dribbling off Hemingway's nose at the starting line. During the races, there are constant choruses of puffing and panting. "Personal Best" is getting praise for its unembarassed focus on nudity and physical performance. Towne is cooly effective, they say, in showing show-ing the nude talks in the steam room. And yet Towne is slightly leering in his choices. A series of shots, showing women's bodies rippling over the high-bar, focuses on the crotch. And he is mostly interested in the lean, attractive attrac-tive woman athlete. There are two or three heavy women on the team the female answer to Russian weight-lifters. But Towne doesn't ever show the power behind that huge bulk, and in the steam room, the heavy women are chastely wrapped in towels. Between dramatic moments, mo-ments, he tends to pad the movie with semi-documentary footage. And he doesn't have a good sense of time or place. (The movie starts before the Montreal games and ends just as a boycott has aborted the '80 competition. competi-tion. But we don't know how Tori, or anyone else, did at the '76 games.) He can give scenes character charac-ter with little oddball details. (Chris and Tori make love by the light of a pelican-shaped lamp.) And he has been astounding in the performances perform-ances he brought from Donnelly and Kenny Morre, a king of big-boned Dennis Weaver who becomes Chris's boyfriend later in the picture. "Personal Best" has a lot of interesting concepts. But it's questionable that they can last the distance. New one-man show at Egyptian The Egyptian Theatre has presented some exciting one-man one-man shows in the last year. We've explored the cosmos with Einstein, literature with Charles Dickens, and music with George Gershwin. Now Park City Perfunc-tories Perfunc-tories invited us last Saturday Satur-day to experience one of the most exciting figures in 20th Century sewer management, as Don Gums appeared in "An Evening with Sluice Wrecker." The stage setting was based on the actual board room of the Snyderville Sewer Improvement District. Dis-trict. Gums, as Wrecker, entered the theatre in jeans, with incredibly realistic looking slime covering his hip boots that sent several people seated in the first row out of the theatre. He began the show by disparaging several old folk tales about sewage. "Ain't no alligators down in the sewers, and they certainly don't plan to come up through the toilet after ya," said the folksy Wrecker. He then launched into an expressive ex-pressive rendition of local line extension agreements, load capacities, and drainage drain-age basins. Gums, a former folk sing- mm ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT: Mid summer watering moratoriums? New water rates? Expense of keeping a lawn? Call 336-2523 er, used a musical segment to express Wrecker's feelings feel-ings in such tender ballads as "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "That 01' Devil Sluice", and "Lazy Brown River Got a Hold on Me." : In the second half of the program, Decker became more sober. He savagely attacked the cutesy depiction depic-tion of waste disposal through such characters as the Tidy Bowl Man. "Sewage is serious business' he said. "You can't fool with it." Wrecker poignantly recalled losing his nephew after the young man body-surfed too close to a treatment plant. Gums brought the crowd to its feet with his final segment. In pantomime, he recreates the famous night of August 15, 1979, when he singlehandedly fought a rupture rup-ture in a Park Meadows line with nothing but his bare hands, a plunger, and a box of cotton swabs. This segment was especially espe-cially effective when the audience used their "Scratch 'n Sniff" cardboard strips, left over from a Salt Lake performance of "Polyester." After a standing ovation, Gums explained to The Newspaper News-paper how he researched the show. "I read everything every-thing I could about him," said Gums. "I talked to people who knew him, studied his voice on KPCW radio tapes. I felt as if I had actually met him." When we asked Gums why he didn't just call Wrecker up at the Snyderville office or follow him around, Gums replied, "An actor shouldn't take shortcuts." The performance will be repeated next week. Admission Admis-sion for Park City Perfunc-tories Perfunc-tories members is $3.50. For nonmembers, $7.00. Special rates are available for senior citizens and members of the Don Gums Fan Club. A Kenny Ranldn to appear in Park City Claimjumper Restaurant 7 SATS A WEE!! G -10 WEEKDAYS 8 - U WEEEEIBS Last month it was Tim Weisberg. This month it's Kenny Rankin who will appear at the Egyptian Theatre for two shows at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. April 10. Writing of Kenny Rankin, the late San Francisco Chronicle critic John Was-serman Was-serman said, "Each song becomes his own creation (even when composed by someone else) and brand new, even if it is his own composition and he has performed it a thousand times before. Moreoever, he is a superlative guitarist..." Kenny began recording at the age of 17. He didn't play an instrument then, so he was confined to plugging his voice into other people's musical ideas. For survival money, he parked cars. "That experience taught me not to undertip people who depend on tips for a living," he laughs. He got a job as a back-up vocalist for a group which soon went to Las Vegas to work. It was there he discovered a form of music entirely apart from the style he had been performing. "Brazilian music turned me around," he explains. "Hearing Joao Gilberto made me want to learn to play the guitar seriously. Back in New York, Don Costa, the great producer-arranger, helped me out and further inspired me." The Modern Jazz Quartet, Cal Tjader, and the Brazilian guitarist Sivuca also influenced influ-enced Kenny's tastes. But it was folk music that added the last major ingredient to the evolving style which today sets Kenny Rankin apart. "For a while I was a staff songwriter for one of the big publishers," he says. "I got a few nice records that way. Peggy Lee titled an album after one of my tunes. Things like that took care of my ego problems as a writer." Recent years have brought Kenny's professional life into perspective: on the road eight to ten months a year, building a devoted following of fans around the country. Rankin's most recent album is After the Roses on Atlantic Records. Tickets for the show are $7 for members of PCP and $9 for general admission. For reservations, call 649-9371. In Salt Lake, tickets may be purchased at Smokeys and the Cosmic Aeroplane. Main Street 649-8051 |