Word: doggerelizer
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...Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman) completed the film in 1994, hoping to promote it with a sound track CD comprising music from the festival stars (James Brown, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba) and new groups like the Fugees, who laid down a rap track over Ali's incantatory doggerel. But no one wanted to distribute the movie--until it won the documentary prize at last year's Sundance festival. The picture opens this week, 22 years late, but just in time for an expected Oscar nomination...
Wallace is the novel's Hippo, so nicknamed decades before as an undergraduate (the reference is to T.S. Eliot's doggerel, "The hippopotamus' day/ Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;/ God works in a mysterious way-/ The Church can sleep and feed at once ..."). Wallace was a drama critic for one of the seedier London newspapers until he arose during an idiotic stage performance and screamed curses. At liberty, he is asked by a terminally ill goddaughter to find out whether a moody 15-year-old boy, Wallace's godson, really has a powerful healing gift...
...would be too bad. It is full of stirring things the adult half-remembers and lovely oddments (Thomas A. Edison's diary in which he records that he was almost run over by a trolley because he was thinking fondly of his wife Mina) and entirely too much sentimental doggerel and the forced marches of Edgar Guest ("All this a baby costs, and yet/ His smile is worth...
...Lifers for another in-your-face metaphysical infuriator. And from San Quentin, Calif., after a 14-year legal preliminary, a night of ghastly last-minute appeals and strap-him-in-take-him- out action as double-murderer Robert Alton Harris flirts with cyanide and exhales death-row doggerel. (Close-up. Harris, macho-sardonic: "You can be a king or a street sweeper,/ But everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.") Back after this...
...athletes began parading past, chaperoned by rhyming verse in English and French, the rah-rah doggerel gave the presentation promenade something of the air of a Miss Universe contest (finding rhymes for "Latvia" and "Cypriot" must surely qualify as an Olympic-style suicide mission). During the ensuing pageantry, classical romanticism was offset with futuristic whimsy. The air of playful modernity, dreamed up by Philippe Decoufle, a 30- year-old high school dropout who talks of getting ideas while asleep, conjured up a Mademoiselle France who was fresh, lighthearted and a little bit spacy...