Word: biz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...desire." He corralled an ad agency that promptly recycled a famous cereal slogan of the early 1960s ("I want my Maypo!") and transformed the message into a new catch phrase, "I want my MTV!" Most important, Pittman conducted the sort of sociological surveying that turns statistical science into show-biz witch doctory, with footnotes. "MTV was the most researched channel in television history," boasts Robert Roganti, MTV's vice president in charge of ad sales...
...motives and character of its central figure. On the other hand, the passage of time has not yet burnished away the ambiguities surrounding this affair, which might have permitted a purely mythic, Gandhi-like approach. In short, the moviemakers are backed into a corner from which neither show-biz sophistry nor a resort to the kind of radical-chic attitudes Nichols has always favored, nor yet a hundred hymns, can lift them. The final unspoken implication of this film is that Karen Silkwood's tragedy lay in the fact that she was cut down just short of the point...
...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...