Word: dad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...these the Cleavers or the Bunkers, this family of four preparing for an ordinary Thanksgiving in 1973? There's Dad (Carroll O'Connor), screwing himself into his easy chair, deflecting harsh words and harder responsibilities. Mom (Frances Sternhagen) is patrolling the house in her robe and bunny snood, calling "Wakey uppy! Wakey uppy!" in the tinny cascades of Texas motherhood. Sis (Linda Cook) is chatting on the phone with her boyfriend and threatening to "devote my entire life to crisis counseling for the holiday-impaired. My mother can be the poster child." And young Jeremy (Christopher Fields), just back from...
Nobody mentions it, but this funny and harrowing play takes place in a Dallas suburb on the tenth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. The coincidence of dates sends Home Front aloft toward political metaphor. Dad may be every "reasonable" statesman who led the U.S. deeper into Viet Nam; Mom and Sis could be every uncommitted American woman, worried sick about her boy or her beau, but hoping against all evidence for the best. And Jeremy may not be kidding when he says that in Viet Nam "I died." Alive or dead, he is the twisted ghost of every...
...final, fatal moments, Home Front goes as berserk as Jeremy, waving a handgun of political didacticism at the audience, turning the American homestead into a Freudian minefield. Here Jeremy is less the middle class's guilty secret than, in his sister's words, "a terminal jerk"; and Dad must expose himself as a paranoiac patriarch whose home is his castle, moated by ignorance. For the two hours preceding this pirouette into psychodrama, Home Front is fiercely sympathetic to all of its characters. Beneath Mom's lyrical ditsiness and Dad's clumsy evasions are two frightened people who care, beyond words...
...Dad, do I have a choice...
...Jeffrey Willis (Matt Dillon) is a poor Brooklyn boy working for the summer at an upper-middle-class Long Island beach club. There he meets a car dealer (Richard Crenna), slightly shady and blatantly materialistic, who tries to tempt him away from the good values of his decent dad (Hector Elizondo), a plumber whose trade may be humble but whose spirit is not. There is originality and poignancy in Neal Marshall's story about competing father figures, and Garry Marshall's direction is unforced but never lackadaisical. The movie is rich in the eccentrically comic details of club...