Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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SUCH HISTORICAL BACKGROUND combines easily with the biography because Mailer's own writing was always reflecting the character of the country. Working for numerous magazines, he covered John F. Kennedy '40 and the space program, the 1968 and 1972 Presidential conventions. His response to his feminist detractors, The Prisoner of Sex, originally appeared in Harper's magazine. As Mills says of his Armies of the Night, Mailer's report of the march on the Pentagon...
...secret of Brooke's personality, and thus the mystery of her lover's death. Throughout the film. Streep brilliantly conveys a vulnerable sensuality and exoticism that makes her character at once alluring and fearfully repellent. Her strikingly blonde hair and pale skin are continually set against a dark background, thus reinforcing her ominous and mysterious image. At times, she seems a lonely apparition in the darkness, a product of Rice's imagination and perhaps a key to his own confused psyche...
...discreet distance between confession and comedy, they allowed the tone of their script to become jarringly uneven. Barnard Hughes and Jessica Tandy, as Paula's parents, are repositories of senile pathos; Audra Lindley, as Richard's mom, is a shtik figureggressively annoying the next, with sutures provided by background music that never lets the viewer discover a mood on his own. One can still savor the moments when Reynolds and Hawn display their easy strengths: Burt's shrugged-off sexiness and decent vulnerability, Goldie's ditsy-pixie charm and daredevil comic timing. The two should remain among the audience...
...last February, for example, Weinberger suggested that Jordan should receive an antiaircraft missile system from the U.S., forcing Reagan to write a soothing letter to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. On the other hand, Weinberger has scant interest in mastering the complexities of arms control negotiations. He has no background or expertise in the field, and so relies on his aides to do his thinking...
...plausibility of this film with a wonderfully implausible premise owes much to its richly realized background. Hoffman lent it some of his autobiography: a young actor struggling to be serious in the alternately flighty and tough world of show biz. Michael Dorsey is the kind of fellow who overthinks the role of a tomato on a commercial and quits an off-Broadway show because he does not want his character to die where the director wants him to. He is, as his agent (wonderfully played by Director Pollack) tells him, "a cult failure." Michael's friends include his playwright...