Word: capra
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...refer, of course, to Senator Jefferson Smith. In Frank Capra's classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy Stewart plays this simple, idealistic small-town American, mocked and scorned by the big-moneyed, oh-so-sophisticated power elite--only to triumph over a corrupt Establishment with his rock-solid goodness...
...hierarchy, who were granted stock options, often because the companies couldn't afford high salaries or generous benefits. Certainly, venture capitalists and investment bankers make money from IPOs, and they can be used to palm off lousy securities to the public. But at their best, IPOs are a Frank Capra movie, not Wall Street...
...years, the working-class town on the border of New Hampshire and Massachusetts has come to rely on the good heart of one man. While Aaron Feuerstein may not look much like Jimmy Stewart, he is the protagonist of a Christmas story every bit as warming as the Frank Capra movie--or the Polartec fabric made at his Malden Mills...
This kind of joyous catharsis is what the old movie masters of romantic comedy--Frank Capra, Leo McCarey--sometimes delivered. You don't expect to find it in adaptations of classic literature. You don't expect to find it in modern movies. You certainly wonder how a Taiwan-born director like Lee (The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman) has managed to reach across time and cultures to deliver these delicate goods undamaged. Maybe some of that whoosh of delight one feels at the end of Sense and Sensibility is for him, and his emergence as a world-class director...
...bustling and impassioned as the best Sturges and Capra movies, this one captures both the purposeful edginess of Administration Pooh-Bahs (Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox, David Paymer and Samantha Mathis--nice jobs, all) and the isolation of the President. You understand why the ultimate lonely guy might make a late-night call to Annette Bening, or Ben Wattenberg. Bening emits too many anguished giggles but is ultimately winning. And Douglas, with his instinct for touchy material that pays off, sells his big speech--a ringing defense of the environment and the A.C.L.U.--so persuasively it might even play...