![]() This means Brent crude can well fall to $60 a barrel, a macro call I made months ago. It is entirely possible that global inventories of crude oil rise by another 50 million barrels in April and May as the China reopening theme is unmasked as a macro delusion. The spike in crude oil storage tanks to 150 million barrels suggests a supply glut in the wet barrel market. It is ironic that crude oil prices are in a free fall even though Russia, a Big Three producer is under sanctions and China, the world's largest importer of commodities has just reopened after a draconian Covid lockdown. Brent crude was $85 two weeks ago and plunged to a low of 71.4 on Friday. Arthur Knight, originally published on Sept.The big chill of recession and a banking panic now haunts black gold, exactly as it did in the last six months of 2008 when Brent crude plunged from $148 a barrel in July to barely $40 in December. Handsomely photographed by John Bailey, jaggedly edited by Carol Littleton (presumably at Kasdan’s insistence), this Columbia release has been chose to close the prestigious New York Film Festival. But in the process, a picture that clearly aspires for more ends up with considerably less. At least, everybody gets to sleep with somebody. William Hurt, the last lingering blossom of the flower children, lingers because he has no place else to go.Īnd so what might have been a meaningful exploration of the changes wrought by 20 years of abrasive reality is diverted, essentially, into who’s going to wind up sleeping with whom. Mary Kay Place stays on because she wants one of her chums, no matter which, to give her a baby. The journalist (Jeff Goldblum) decides to hang around because he smells a juicy scandal developing around TV star Berenger and bored housewife JoBeth Williams, or perhaps something savory in the relationship between his late friend and his sexy mistress (Meg Tilly). His unexpected demise jolts them momentarily into recollections of the idealistic youth. It’s unfortunately symptomatic of the invention in this film that all the characters have been assembled by the suicide of one of their number, a college chum who had remained nonconformist to the end. The writers have given them nowhere to go. And no matter how desperately his cast of excellent young actors, headed by Tom Berenger, Glenn Close and William Hurt, tries to flesh them out in individual scenes (there’s a particularly affecting early morning jogging sequence with Hurt and Kevin Kline, for example), the characters keep returning to ground zero. Instead, he is insistently head-on, reducing each of his people to a simplified cartoon figure - the successful businessman, the popular TV star, the disillusioned lady lawyer, the frustrated housewife, the opportunistic journalist, etc. Perhaps if Kasdan saw some humor in his characters (as John Sayles did in The Return of the Secaucus 7, which this film often startlingly resembles), these techniques might have been acceptable. They are walking case histories paraded before one-way mirrors by a particularly cold and insensitive social anthropologist.Īnd a blasting score culled from Motown oldies, no doubt intended as a counterpoint to the complacent ’80s, proves not only intrusive, but invariably shatters the mood of whatever is on the screen, even to the point of blotting out dialogue with the screaming lyrics. ![]() ![]() One soon gets the impression that he cares less for his characters than for their interweaving stories. Scenes no sooner seem to get started than Kasdan cuts abruptly to another part of the forest, sometimes returning to what he had so recently abandoned, sometimes not. Nor does the fragmented style of the film help.
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