![]() The film isn't so much overstylized as much as it's entirely built upon overstylizing, and with all of its good intentions, the film just ends up executing its interesting yet flawed concepts with a bit too much faithfulness to overbearingness and makes for an underwhelming overall final product. It's gimmick that works more often than you'd think, to be sure, yet it is gimmick nevertheless, and after a while of watching all of this trippy imagery and ceaseless singery, while you'll surprisingly never completely fall out of the film, the gimmick is bound to where thin here and there, and your attention and investment with it for a moment. It's certainly a uniquely nifty novelty, and one that isn't too terribly hard to mind, yet the problem is that it is nothing more than just novelty, serving no real advantageous purpose to the film's concepts and being nothing more than gimmick. Of course, with all of the non-plot and profound lack - nay - absence of subtlety, one of the biggest blows to the film's effectiveness is, of course, the fact that it is gimmicky as all get-out, being entirely without traditional dialogue or exposition and being told entirely through surrealistic music video imagery and often corny musical numbers. This profound lack of subtlety and considerable blow to resonance certainly taints the film's real intentions, because with all of this plot taking a backseat to thematic messaging and interpretive musical numbers, - which are specifically designed to serve as extra emphatic exposition - all of the themes that should be undertones become glaring overtones, and sometimes, the sole focus of the film, to where the film damages the effectiveness of its themes by overbearingly overemphasizing them to a preachy extent, and it doesn't help that, by 1975 alone, these themes of "it's the world that's truly blind" were discussed to death, and primarily through more than enough music. The film is nothing if not ultrastylized filmmaking experimentation, boasting a bare-bones and underused plot that primarily serves as a vehicle for interpretive musical numbers and thematic messaging, so of course the story isn't terribly well thought-out, and I'm not asking for it to be, though this film, with all of its surrealism, exaggerations, forced events and, of course, "pinball aspects", gets to be too corny and is all but consistent in being unsubtle about its paying little mind to crafting a compelling stand-alone story, thus diluting emotional resonance considerably. Eh, whatever, this is still a pretty fun film, even if you have to be on drugs to really appreciate it.No, I think that even potheads would get weirded out by this film, for although this is quite the piece of entertainment, it sometimes doesn't just get far-out, but just plain "out of sight" (Get it?), and not necessarily in a good way. Yeah, I know that crazy tall footwear sounds more like the concoction of potheads, but really, I don't know if you can make up some of the stuff in this film, even if you were as high as Elton John physically was in those Pinball Wizard shoes, though I'd imagine this stuff would be fun to see while you're high, or at least until they bring out the Pinball Wizard, because, I don't know about y'all, but a 10-foot-tall Elton John playing the piano and pinball at the same time is too trippy to handle for someone who's not high. Yeah, this film probably doesn't really help the rumors that Pete Townshend is gay it certainly made for a dead giveaway for Elton John, because the only kind of people I can see wearing something as crazy as those super shoes or whatever they are are either flamboyantly gay or some really retro hipsters, and we were just barely on our way out of the hippie era by the time this film came out, and hardly getting started towards the hipster era, so that kind of narrows it down. ![]() Golden Globe-winning performance (We'll just forget about that and the giving of Best Dramatic Actress to Sharon Stone for "Casino" when comparing the decisions of the Oscars and Globes), I suppose things went by just fine, though make no mistake, this film is so cheesy that, for a second there, I almost thought that this was a biopic on Tommy Tutone (They didn't even show up until two years after this film, but I was still pretty suspicious). ![]() What could possibly go wrong? Well, with the exception of Ann-Margret's. Reasonably family-friendly social metaphorical overtones within the story of a blind, deaf and dumb master pinball player that's told entirely through musical numbers and by '60s and '70s musicians in acting roles.
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