Word: coppolas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...conference call of the U.S. Supreme Court. Only Sandra Day O'Connor, who was traveling in Africa, was not available for the hurriedly arranged session. The Justices had been asked, at the very last hour, to decide whether to allow the execution later that night of Frank J. Coppola, 38, a convicted murderer who wished to die. After discussing the case, Chief Justice Warren Burger and four others voted to overturn a stay that had been issued by an appeals judge earlier in the day. About 45 minutes later, that news reached Coppola at Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond...
Despite the dramatic swiftness of the denouement, the early stages of the case were drawn out with all the familiar rounds of inventive appeals. Coppola, a former seminary student and policeman, had been convicted of brutally killing a woman during a 1978 robbery. By last spring, 34 judges had heard his various legal arguments, and still he sat on death row at Mecklenburg Correctional Center. Though maintaining his innocence, he dropped his appeals and asked that the execution proceed. "Further incarceration," he said, "can only lead to my being stripped of all personal dignity." His one request: a summer date...
...screen mayhem, however, gains its authenticity from the heart. Stallone has built his stories on psychic lines that owe as much to myth as to realism. Says Shire, who is Francis Ford Coppola's sister: "Sylvester tapped the American spirit. I think a person who spent so long with his nose pressed against the window sees things in a most interesting way. Despite his success, he's extremely accessible. That's what's so ironic. Stallone is so famous now he has to stay isolated behind those gates to protect himself...
ALMOST THE ENTIRE supporting cast similarly lacks freshness. Rocky III has almost become it self-parody. In interviews, Talia Shire insists that she doesn't just want to be known as Francis Ford Coppola's sister. Better the sister of Apocalypse Now's maker than this most recent incarnation of Rocky's main squeeze. Shire parades through the film with but two emotions, and you can't miss them. When she's proud, she smiles hesitatingly, blanks back tears, and lowers her head. When she's worried, she frowns hesitatingly, blinks back tears, and lowers her head. Her character, however...
...fault movie. Actually it was, and remains, a television show, based on John Updike's short stories about how Joan and Richard Maple drifted apart. It is being given a second life in the theaters because someone up there at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios liked it and thought the film deserved a second chance. It is hard to see why. The Maples are a couple who seem to have no great quarrel with each other, therefore no reason for their philandering ways. Their divorce, when it comes, is just like their marriage: civilized, ruefully witty...