Word: allene
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...boost performance--especially minority performance. He also took on state teachers' colleges, telling them that 70% of graduates in each minority group must pass the state teacher-certification exam or the schools would risk losing accreditation; 35 of the state's 86 colleges are now on probation. Says Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, "Few Governors have been willing to test as much as he has. Texas is well on its way toward real accountability and real reform, and that movement wasn't there before Bush was Governor. He's at the top of a small pack...
...window. He testily parsed fine distinctions (Microsoft's "deal" with Apple vs. their "relationship") and professed to be nonplussed by common Anglo-Saxon words ("I have no idea what you're talking about when you say 'ask.'"). At times the wiry, high-pitched, tousled-haired billionaire morphed into Woody Allen riffing on Bill Clinton's deposition in the Ken Starr inquiry...
...Woody Allen's Celebrity tracks the former's possibly predictable fall and the latter's entirely unexpected rise within the tensely striving world of Manhattan's media and cultural demimonde. Since Branagh's performance (rather daringly) imitates Allen's anxiously stammering screen persona, and Davis is doing something she has done--expertly--for the writer-director before, playing a jilted, tilted woman, it may sound as if this is yet another of Allen's comically discordant chamber pieces about the impossibility of permanent connection between postmodern urbanites who think too much about themselves and feel too little for each other...
From the Manhattan skyline to Woody driveling anxiety to his shrink, the first moments of Antz suggest a film destined to become another prototypical Woody Allen movie. Until Woody (now an ant named "Z") gets off the psychoanalyst's couch and walks into "The Colony." The makers of Antz seem particularly interested in demonstrating their ability to depict water and human movement, disregrading the fact that the plot must make some rather forced detours in order to accommodate these animated showpieces. Though the character of Allen as well as those of the other actors (voiced by Dan Akroyd, Anne Bancroft...
...second is the acting, the two standouts being Maguire, who gives a beautifully nuanced performance as the film's emotional center, and Joan Allen as his (Pleasantville) mother: independently and together, they account for nearly all of the movie's most poignant moments. The fact that Allen plays the same role she always does, i.e., the repressed wife/mother figure with a hidden reservior of intense feeling, would be more annoying if she didn't do it so superbly, exactly right. Next to her, William Macy is merely adequate, though often quite funny, as the impotent and increasingly bewildered father figure...