Word: biz
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...energetic) rhinestone settings; not one of her 14 tunes offers a memorable melody or a surprising chord pattern. It does surprise that Margo Sappington's choreography is so stunningly inept, that the cast is strident and charmless. In turning some likable icons of the center-left into show-biz brats, this musical Doonesbury emerges as a vision of '70s youth only Richard Nixon could love. -By Richard Corliss
...scenario is not too elaborate or cynical for the byzantine world of show biz: sponsor recalcitrance triggers stress. Tapes are leaked, positions taken, battle lines drawn, articles written. No movie since CBS's 1980 Holocaust film Playing for Time has stirred such a dust devil of ideological p.r., but the stakes are even larger here. The Day After cost an opulent $7 million, and its promotion budget may ultimately equal that fig ure. ABC, gambling that it will make up in ratings what it misses in ad dollars, schedules the film for sweeps week, when the three networks...
...high earnestness sweepstakes. Meyer concedes his movie "has a minimum of imagination" but thinks Dr. Strangelove is "distilled through comedy," which presumably means that his own enterprise, being so conspicuously short of humor, serves some loftier social purpose. This type of cultural con is a piece of undiluted show-biz self-protection, and a good thing too. Political immediacy is just about all The Day After has going for it. By any standards other than social, it is a terrible movie...
Oswald Spengler, who liked to think that the twilight of Western civilization will be marked not by true religion, but by an upsurge of fervid religiosity. Jesus Christ Superstar, the rock opera that is rocking Broadway's new season, is show biz with a twist: Director Tom O'Horgan, who was influenced by Olsen & Johnson, has made it into a sort of Heavenzapoppin...
...currently in musical disfavor among her peers, Ronstadt has found a fresh direction. What's New, released last week by Asylum, avoids all the obvious routes. Powered by the celestial arrangements of Nelson Riddle, the album is not a sentimental journey, a dizzy camp-out or a show-biz grandstand play. It is a simple, almost reverent, rendering of nine great songs that time has not touched. At first hearing, Ronstadt's fans may be taken aback by the suave but swinging Riddle orchestra, by the playfulness and sophistication of the lyrics, by the tidal pulls of strong...