Word: charming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Practical-minded modern Americans have been contemptuous of follies, those curious buildings meant only to charm and delight. But recent architectural fashion has been tending toward the fey, even the frivolous. This winter in the American heartland, form follows fantasy completely: in St. Paul and Galveston, Texas, local volunteers have just finished putting up elaborate municipal whimsies...
...moment, Pete (played with a sinuously boyish charm by Richard Gere) has more pressing problems. He has candidates in trouble all over the map: a Governor's divorce and remarriage in the far West; a rich candidate's cabbageheaded stupidity in the Southwest; the hold on a Midwestern senatorial candidate by agents of an Arab oil state. The true purpose of these cliches and intrigues is to supply Power with some paranoiac melodrama of the kind that is nowadays never absent from movies about American politics. Pete may be involved, either as unwitting coconspirator or victim, in something more menacing...
...pasta theme, not only alternative sizes of current shapes, but vanished, not-quite-forgotten birds, animals, man-in-the-moon-profile crescents, tiny notched wheels that look like watch gears and a variety of other small shapes that would be lovely if dipped in gold and hung on charm bracelets. Most startling are the long noodles in the angular forms of triangles and diamonds, even a large curving quatrefoil. They are not made anymore because "they take too long to dry," Ronza explains, "especially those with corners." All of which seems a pity, for they would certainly appeal to postmodernist...
...seemed for a moment to stop reading the cue cards. Hinting at the secrecy of the Soviet space program, he was wide-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, virtually light-hearted. He had the cocky, cagey look of a reverend who has suddenly resurrected humor from a grim funeral party, the irreproachable charm of a boy who has insouciantly wiped his nose on his mother's burial shroud...
...slurred words and crooked teeth. He has a cocky, lanky body language, like a scarecrow loosed on a three-day drunk. Basinger is better, fiesty and dignified and lovely to watch. The scene in which she washes herself is unspeakably beautiful. Quaid is fine as the boyfriend, with a charm as harmless and crooked as his bowtie. And Harry Dean Stanton gives another superlative performance. He ranks with Robert Duvall as our finest character actor...