Word: cagneys
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Weiner's witty script plays out the drama of this totalitarian nightmare state in a cheesy brothel/dance hall. "The Pleasure Quarters" is the home of the "only star in the Galaxy," an annoying James Cagney sound-alike named Vic Voom (Steven Schardt). His nightly dance numbers feature a relentlessly jolly chorus line of five busty women and an idiot-savant break-dancer named Timmy...
...marquee do not, of course, guarantee dramatic splendor inside. The Branagh play is a trifle that searches for nightmare poetry in "plain old American-Irish English" and for political significance in the story of a Belfast punk (Paul Ronan) obsessed by the grit and grace of Jimmy Cagney. It finds none of the above, lost as it is in a muddle of moralizing and attitudinizing. But it shares a potent theme with the season's cannier off-Broadway ventures: that star worship is a virus, carried by the popular media and infecting anyone who has a little talent...
...point. They are content to update the old prison genre deftly and unpretentiously. It always did work when it was done well, and it still does; and if using Redemption in the title instead of the more accurate Revenge helps to bring in the upwardly mobile, who cares? James Cagney would have felt right at home in Shawshank...
Except, of course, that Stone doesn't let you stand back. NBK plunders every visual trick of avant-garde and mainstream cinema -- morphing, back projection, slow motion, animation and pixillation on five kinds of film stock -- and, for two delirious hours, pushes them in your face like a Cagney grapefruit. The actors go hyper-hyper, the camera is ever on the bias, the garish colors converge and collide, and you're caught in this Excedrin vision of America in heat. The ride is fun too, daredevil fun of the sort that only Stone seems willing to provide in this timid...
...months for overselling ads in store coupon books under the alias David Creditford -- "a con man who thought he was smarter than anyone else," a defense attorney recalled to New York Newsday. Stevens reputedly suffered from emotional instability -- at his 1987 trial he launched into a speech about Jimmy Cagney. More seriously, in 1992 local merchants Susan Katz and John Spinelli filed a police complaint when, they say, after nine months of harassment that included cruising their block and stealing their garbage, Stevens threatened to burn their business down...