Word: boxes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Cohn, a British emigre, has written mostly about rock music. He made the trip from Grub Street toward Easy Street by way of Hollywood: the film version of his 1976 New York magazine story about Brooklyn disco culture was a box office smash. Cohn's subsequent New York cover was "24 Hours on 42nd Street," a lurid first-person account of a day and night spent swallowing street drugs amid the sexual sleaze of Times Square...
...into power in 1980. As a physical-education instructor fighting for the military's right to form a union, he managed almost inadvertently to overthrow the democratically elected, but divisive, government of Henk Arron. At first, the new regime was so diffident that it hung up a suggestion box soliciting advice on how to run the country, and Bouterse, its popular and athletic leader, even resolved to complete his high school education. Only much later was it discovered that one of his tutors had become his mistress and was schooling him in the writings of Lenin and Marx...
Ford, 40, is the only one to break out of his Star Wars mold, and that is only because he won the role of Indiana Jones in another Lucas-inspired film, Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Star Wars gave him visibility, but Raiders made him a box-office draw. "People want fairy tales in their lives, and I'm lucky enough to provide them," Ford says with a touch of cynicism. "There is no difference between doing this kind of film and playing King Lear. The actor's job is exactly the same: dress up and pretend." Nonetheless...
Presumably, the public has made it a box-office sellout in the titillating hope that it is a keyhole drama. Sad to say, Liz and Dick are almost as inept at playing themselves as they are at re-creating Coward's characters. All passion spent, they seem blankly disaffected, otherwise engaged. The chemistry between them is about as combustible as lukewarm tea, though their quarrels raise ghostly, vulgarized echoes of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...
...most unappealing characters with vitality and strength. Rev is a paranoid crank but the only person in the book to take heroic action. To keep matters consistently bizarre, Berger describes the codger's funeral through the eyes of Junior, the teen-age lout: "As he watched the bronze box being lowered into the grave he could not help thinking of that little ditty that went: Your eyes fall in/ Your teeth fall out/ The worms crawl over/ Your nose and mouth. Dying was a lousy thing, and he intended to avoid it, for its inevitability seemed only theoretical...