Word: devil
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...student, I know that I have to be on the right track. It's sort of like ending up on Nixon's enemies list or in an FBI file of "subversives"--a backhanded sort of compliment. Reading Peninsula often gives me the renewed encouragement and motivation to beat the devil...
...present beneath the surface; in his performances, there is a smoldering Afrocentricity that gives his work depth, connecting it to a cultural reality larger than the movies in which he appears. In one scene in The Pelican Brief, he kicks at a cab that has passed him by. In Devil in a Blue Dress, his character takes pointed pride in being one of the few blacks in his neighborhood to own his own home. Says Carl Franklin, who directed Devil: "Denzel is blessed. He has 'it.'" Other black actors had it but never got the chance. Washington, at last...
...classic pop and prime Newman. The tunes are jaundiced, lyrical and funny; the libretto (by Newman, with a tip of the hat to Johann Wolfgang) winningly softhearted and hardheaded where it counts. The composer has also exercised his artistic prerogative by giving himself the best part. He plays the devil...
...Stephen Sondheim (whom Newman reveres), and it is performed on the album with tremendous brio by James Taylor, who sports a no-sweat self-mocking cool as God; Linda Ronstadt as the tremulous, winsome Margaret; Bonnie Raitt as Martha, a piece of trade tough enough to wring out the devil's heart; and Don Henley as Faust, reborn here as a guitar-strumming freshman at Notre Dame who's slacker enough to sign Satan's contract for his soul without great thought, or even a quick read through. Even the devil thinks Faust is lame...
...speaking a private eye. He is also a black man. But these two significant--and dramatically potent--differences aside, novelist Walter Mosley's creation is the truest heir we have yet had to Raymond Chandler's immortal Philip Marlowe. And writer-director Carl Franklin's cool, expert adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress, Mosley's first novel, evokes the spirit of '40s film noir more effectively than any movie since Chinatown...