Word: cliches
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...multitude of people in a multitude of imaginative ways. That they manage this without causing any loss of sympathy for him shows a close analysis of the problem of selling the star when he is not defending Rocky's title as the heavyweight champion of the heartwarming clich...
...fact, they are. Their grid and curlicues come out of Matisse via Richard Diebenkorn, suffering indignities in translation: the drawing is sloppy, the color mud. There are also some steals from Robert Motherwell, in the form of maps of Europe with overpainting. Such work is homage rendered as cliché; but then Schnabel's reputation rests more on his plate paintings, layer on layer of broken crockery combined with things like antlers and twigs and slathered in paint...
...corncob, underneath the plastered-down hair, is Laurence Olivier as the general, unable to cut loose either with an approximation of MacArthur's grand manner or the satire of it he seems sometimes to want to try. On the ground in Korea, caught in a withering enfilade of clichés, is Ben Gazzara as an officer with no unit, no fixed duties and an inexplicable relationship to the general that permits him to witness all sorts of unedifying carnage. He has an estranged wife (rather gamely played by Jacqueline Bisset), whose function it is to become a refugee...
...mention a lovely bride. Gere and Winger play this nonsense as if neither one of them had ever seen an old-fashioned military romance, and bless their youthful innocence, perhaps they haven't. Director Hackford, however, surely has, since he demonstrates an encyclopedic eye for their clichés. All eagerly serve Writer Stewart's earnest desire to reduce experience (he is a Navy OCS graduate) to pulp. Never does a satirical gleam enter anyone's eye. The result is a Big Mac of a movie, junk food that somehow reaches the chortling soul. -By Richard Schickel
...applause is only the most conspicuous of the traits that impel a person toward the actor's life. Not quite so visibly, the actor type tends to have a streak of emotional gluttony on or off stage or screen. The result is an inclination to inflate the clichés of existence with more dramatic heat than ordinary people can work up. The tendency to view life as though it were play-acting often surfaces in actors' words. Writes Gene Tierney at the end of Self Portrait: "If my life had been a movie, would a director have...