Word: airhead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Saturday-matinee serials, gangster dramas with hearts of fudge, airhead romantic comedies. Think they don't make movies like these anymore? Look around, think again and weep a little for the art of cinema. The first reel of a picture will tantalize with originality of story or tone. Then genre anxiety sets in--the filmmakers' compulsion to return to the formats that have worked, and been worked to death, for decades. Can't take the risk of challenging those people out there in the dark; it might frighten them. Movies have to be like TV now: a medium...
...then Reagan has always been attended by an aura of amiable averageness. The producer Alfred de Liagre said that Reagan on film "always had the manner of an earnest gas-station attendant." Liberal writers have dismissed him as ideologue, cretin and airhead, or worse. They have thought of Chauncey Gardiner, the transcendentally brainless seer in Jerzy Kosinski's novel Being There. Gardiner, in the eloquence of his idiocy, becomes a national oracle. "How humiliating," the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote of Reagan in 1982, "to think of this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin being our President...
...Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys," the country kitten has made a bet with her manager that in two weeks she can turn this city rat into a down-home singing star. Anyone who has trouble predicting the order and outcome of each succeeding scene in this amiable airhead of a movie will be required to stay after class and read Pygmalion 100 times...
...SHOW never strays too far from its comic trump cards--buffoonery and lewdness. The crowd is treated to a male slave (Bob Brown) being forced by Pseudolus to don women's clothing, only to be pursued by nearly every man in the cast. The young girl Philia plays her airhead-blonde character to the hilt, unwittingly offering herself to the wrong men and ruining the schemes designed to unite her with Hero. And Pseudolus moves rapidly from character to character, passing himself off as head of the house, a soothsayer, a brothel-keeper, and, of course, Cupid...
...convince us that she is old and that life is passing her by, repeatedly draws out each of her lines, but the result seems more like a six-year-old whining. Pentecost also tries to make Babe appear naively infantile. But what emerges instead is simply a ridiculous airhead who becomes not only unconvincing but predictable. By Act III, as we wait for Lenny to whine and Babe to act spacy, the play loses its initial spontaneity...