Word: cutenesses
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Once Biko dies, barely an hour into the film, Woods carries the narration; he plots his escape to any land that will publish his Biko biography. The police threaten his cute family with errant gunfire and toxic T shirts, and the viewer is meant to recoil from these domestic atrocities. Of course they are horrid, yet their intended impact reinforces, in dramatic terms, the Afrikaners' credo: white lives mean more. Piling on bogus suspense devices as Woods snakes his way toward freedom, Attenborough lets the venality of South African imperialism degenerate into a staid chase film: The Brady Bunch Flees...
WHAT CAN one really say about Harvey, that good old adorable 1940s comedy about a rich, eccentric family whose bachelor uncle thinks he sees a giant rabbit? This play is it--the absolute warhorse of warhorses, a cuddly, cute and utterly innocuous script which hit its peak 30 years ago with a Jimmy Stewart movie and has since been relegated to the position of favored stand-by for a hundred thousand suburban high schools...
...Dining Room's versatile and polished cast of four women and four men take on a total of more than 50 characters. Each actor covers his share of WASP territory--each one seems to play a cute, babbling brat at least once, and there are enough overbearing octogenarians and strait-laced domestics to give everyone a chance to age. Director Onbargi and his cast never allow the quick switches to render the evening's entertainment a mere collection of acting exercises. Aside from its location in the Ex, there's nothing experimental about this Dining Room...
Most of the other performances are equally perfunctory. Kristina and Michelle Kennedy, the twins who play Elizabeth, are cute, but they look too old to be a convincing one-year-old. Keaton's is the only performance that displays emotion above and beyond the call of duty, but then hers is the only character who is not a complete caricature...
...believable and her naivete is charming. And thus she is utterly at odds with the chic gallery people who treat her like a lost puppy--lovable and amusing but not worth their attention. When Polly hears them say a painter has "acute awareness," she thinks they mean "a cute awareness, like a cute face...