Word: connor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...curse of the greatest TV actors is that no one believes they're acting. As Archie Bunker, the beseiged blue-collar bigot and patriarch of "All in the Family," Carroll O'Connor became his character so completely and physically that it was impossible to imagine him as a separate person. It wasn't just his New York-y delivery - those "youses" and "terlets" - but the way he carried himself: the tousled hair, the bone-weary shamble, the plaintive Irish eyes rolling heavenward at the dingbats and pinkos who surrounded him in his own house...
...Connor played him, Archie Bunker was perpetually and evocatively tired: tired from his job working the loading docks, tired from dealing with the new world of strangers (blacks, Jews, Catholics) who moved into his Queens neighborhood in a period of urban flux, tired of the shocks to his system as a lifetime of immutable values changed around him minute by minute. He put the "lump" in "lumpenproletariat." "All in the Family," the boundary-shattering comedy about what folks used to call "the generation gap," would have been a classic regardless, because of the passion of producer Norman Lear's ideas...
...account of actual events submitted to Poe -- is reflected in several of his own short stories, including the marvellously titled "Heavy Put-Away, or a Hustle Not Wholly Devoid of a Certain Grossness, Granted," found in this collection. An account of a mean prank worthy of Flannery O'Connor at her darkest, "Heavy" is one of Southern's most pointed comments about human nature, and a perfect example of his crisp, succinct approach to writing (one can think of several crime novelists - e.g.think Donald Westlake - who would have spun "Heavy" into a full-length "scam" novel...
...love could make him human. David is the cybergenic triumph of Professor Hobby (William Hurt). Who wouldn't want this perfect child, years past colic and teething, years before the gonadal eruptions of puberty? The chosen "parent" is Henry (Sam Robards), a Cybertronics employee whose wife Monica (Frances O'Connor) has sunk into remorse because their son Martin (Jake Thomas) is in a coma. So here's a pick-me-up for a grieving mother: a machine that looks and acts like a kid--the best kid ever...
...camera work, dramatic lighting and savvy editing that you get when a terrific filmmaker is on his game. He isn't always, though. Intriguing plot twists (like the exploits of the nicely malicious Martin) are dropped for excursions that are more about art direction than efficient storytelling. And O'Connor lacks the maternal and womanly radiance that's needed, since the film is basically about a boy's urge to crawl into his mother...