Word: cybill
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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They settle temporarily on the body of a southern California corporate hot shot, Leo Farnsworth, who has just been poisoned by his paranoid wife (played by the zaftig Dyan Cannon) and her lover, Farnsworth's eager-to-please private secretary, (Charles Grodin, the lovable shiksachaser who woos and wins Cybil Shepard in The Heartbreak Kid). Farnsworth turns out to be a particularly loathsome tycoon as he alternately comes under attack from both his adulterous wife and scheming secretary and from enviornmental protection groups protesting his multinational's unsafe and exploitative practices...
THIS YEAR'S installment of America's oldest ongoing response to Kabuki featured the usual raft of pretty boys in leotards, tennis-ball halves and wigs, playing pretty girls with puns instead of names ("Jemima Fysmoke," "Cybil Service"), whose stock-in-trade is the Big Pun ("You made an asteroid out of yourself!"). Or, alternately, the Silly Joke ("Don't Be a Dope Head, Buy a Moped"). Or, alternately, the Cliche ("Let's Do It"); it's 2078, after all. As far as I could discern from the production notes, the main plot-line consists of a mad grab...
DeNiro's kooky, then homicidal aimlessness comes on very right for the times, but the world Scorcese has him encounter comes off very wrong. It seems that Scorcese figures that anyone who isn't down and out these days has turned into a plastic offspring of Madison Avenue. (Hence Cybil Shepard as the Tab-drinking campaign worker DeNiro falls in love with and the slick, wind-up presidential candidate he tries to assassinate.) So with nothing else but Barbies and Kens to identify with, Scorcese saves the film by throwing DeNiro into the arms of today's real myth-maker...
Last Picture Show. A masterpiece about life in a small Texas town in the 50s. Without overstatement, and with great attention to detail, the film sympathetically unmasks the quiet desperation that underlies its characters' existence. The acting is perfect, and the movie is wisely shot in black and white. Cybil Shepard's role as the spoiled daughter of an oil tycoon is the performance that started her movie career. Cinema...