Word: callowness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rehab clinic. The movie, which drops the postcards but keeps the edge, is a show-biz mother-daughter film par excellence -- Terms of Endearment out of Gypsy. Suzanne has her poignant wrangles with movie types (nice turns by Dennis Quaid and Rob Reiner as producers, Gene Hackman and Simon Callow as directors), but Postcards is bound by family ties. MacLaine gives a wonderfully excessive rendition of the Sondheim song I'm Still Here: "First you're another sloe-eyed vamp,/ Then someone's mother, then you're camp." In Postcards she is all of these, and better still she finds...
...issues are proliferating, as usual, but with a new strain of self-criticism. The extended family that is the focus of CBS's Sons and Daughters includes a twentysomething couple trying to adjust to a new baby. Mom is exasperated at having to breast-feed so often, while her callow husband is more excited about his automatic tennis server. The same sort of problem seems imminent for the expectant parents of Married People, an ABC sitcom about couples in a New York City apartment house. She's a lawyer disgusted by her swollen ankles; he's a writer who seems...
...most improbable of circumstances. She could be a convincing "older woman," older than Eve, when barely out of her teens. She could find temporary haven in the spindly arms of any callow leading man MGM cast opposite her, or in the mature embrace of a Gilbert or John Barrymore. She could play vibrant love scenes with just a vase of flowers (A Woman of Affairs) or bedroom furniture (Queen Christina). She could suggest regal exhaustion with the minutest shift in posture, then fling an extravagant gesture at the movie audience, daring it to laugh. She could laugh at herself...
...impatient orchestra players. Besides, any conductor who was foolish enough to flog his musicians with images of leaves -- let alone leaves whimpering in denial -- would be hooted off the podium at the first fluttering whimp. Thomas learned a lesson on this point in his callow days during a rehearsal of Also Sprach Zarathustra with the Chicago Symphony. All his schoolboy nattering on the intellectual subtext of Strauss evoked only sly mockery from the musicians. At length, Thomas got the message...
Manuel Antonio Noriega is hardly the Emperor of the Turks. But seizing Noriega and bringing him back to the U.S. in chains is a similar callow triumphalist flourish by President George Bush, the former wimp. Modern media saved Bush the necessity of lugging Noriega in a cage to future summits and election rallies. That prison mug shot of the humiliated former dictator became an instant worldwide image...