Word: charm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Vargas Llosa's languorous coupling of high culture and high decadence has, like Lima, a faded charm. It is not for hedonists who prefer their stimulation red hot and humorless...
...Sure, it's un-American not to back the underdog, but even the hardworking, muttily named Utah Jazz (did Satchmo summer in Salt Lake?), with its working-class Mailman and great white hopes, couldn't drag us away from Jordan's charm. For a spasm of a second last month, it seemed O.K. if Larry Bird's Pacers won the conference championship--there was mythological resonance to the protagonist's being felled by a warrior ghost--but by Game 7, we were right back in our proper seats behind Jordan. We wanted one more hit of Jordan's hyperintensity...
This puts a burden on the stars, for the movie has to run on their charm. Ford's cranky masculinity is, of course, a known quantity, although it's always fun to watch him simmer, snort and eventually soften. Snub-nosed, wide-eyed and high-spirited, Heche has an equally conventional transition to make, from Xanex-popping, would-be sophisticate with minimal survival skills to a woman who can bop a bad guy with a fallen tree branch and help repair the airplane for a getaway. She is also encumbered with a tiresome fiance (David Schwimmer), who takes...
...dissenters. Governor Ronald Reagan, for one, believed the government did the right thing in 1952. During the 1972 visit, Chaplin, at 83, said he'd long ago given up radical politics, a welcome remark in a nation where popular favor has often been synonymous with depoliticization. But the ravishing charm and brilliance of his films are inseparable from his convictions...
Looking back, though, it seems likely that the Beatles--with their buoyant spirits, their bottomless charm, their unaccustomed and irrepressible wit--could probably have boosted the mirth quotient at a clown convention. Their overflowing gifts for songcraft, harmony and instrumental excitement, their spiffy suits and nifty haircuts, their bright quips and ready smiles, made them appear almost otherworldly, as if they had just beamed down from some distant and far happier planet...