Word: biz
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Strewn throughout this story are seemingly gratuitous nods to bits and pieces of popular culture: show-biz celebrities, movies, rock groups. Maynard suggests that her alienated characters suffer the modern ailment of media overload. Toward the end of the novel, the mother of the hired teenage killer speaks: "One minute you're sitting there, reading some article in a magazine all about Tom Selleck or someone, the next thing you know they're putting handcuffs on your son. . .It doesn't feel like your real life, you know? It feels like you're on a show too. Only there...
...vast, tragic empire collapses. The economy constricts painfully. But ordinary life -- and extraordinary life -- goes on. People still write novels and environmental treaties, design solar cells and stage sets, orchestrate symphonies and ad campaigns. They still care about tossing a salad or a baseball superbly. From science to show biz, they exert all the passion, wit, ingenuity, game playing -- and, yes, the ego, venality and damn-fool silliness -- that keep the human enterprise steaming along so entertainingly...
...trio -- and "for seven years," as the front man himself later remembered, "we knocked ourselves out." Cole had begun to sing, he later recalled, "to break the monotony," and by the time they joined Mercer's new label the trio had gone about as far in jazz and show biz as a black outfit could in those days...
Both performers are brave in their willingness to dig into familiar show-biz types and critically, if often hilariously, deconstruct their belovedness. They are also resourceful in the ways they find to retain our affection. Good writing, in which strong satire never breaks faith with emotional reality, helps them. So do the easy stride of Mark Rydell's direction, covering a variety of ground without shortness of breath, and a lively supporting cast...
CINEMA Bette Midler evokes older, bolder show biz in For the Boys...