Word: eastwicks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...punkette in Grease 2, as Al Pacino's coked-out wife in Scarface, as a Hitchcockian heroine with a Los Angeles '80s twist in Into the Night. Then, switching on the Cinderella smile, she became a princess in the medieval adventure Ladyhawke and the sweetest witch in Eastwick. She has played movie stars in Sweet Liberty and PBS's Natica Jackson, two fables about creatures of illusion manipulating the reality of voyeurs who dare mistake the actress for the role...
...Warner Bros. must have been traumatized by a move to the 'burbs; Funny Farm is Warner's third comedy in a year to deal with New Yorkers who find angst in New England. (Another film, Moving, exiled Richard Pryor from New Jersey to darkest Idaho.) But The Witches of Eastwick and Beetlejuice had infernal satire in mind and an intelligent eye for the grotesque. Funny Farm is mostly just a country store stocked with stale notions and antique gags: Mr. Bland Builds His Dream House...
Director Tim Burton (Pee-Wee's Big Adventure) has some poignant points to make about, well, life: that the dead must teach the living to savor it. Mostly, though, he wants to give good fun, to turn Winter River into West Eastwick, to ransack pop culture for references to everything from Topper to Tiny Alice. And to give Michael Keaton the chance to run productively wild. Keaton's Beetlejuice is a deliciously loathsome creature, whether shouting insults, lunching on insects or, in the film's climactic wedding scene, pulling a ring off a severed, shriveled finger and muttering...
...last novel, Witches of Eastwick, Updike eschewed the first person, using the next best thing: restricted third person narration. Feminists objected to the complete mystification Updike demonstrated towards women in that novel, as he ascribed to them all manner of extraordinary, supernatural abilities. Updike's direct assumption of the female voice in S. is at the very least a gutsy move, a bridging of what Marilynne Robinson called his "perplexed and fascinated distance," from the lives of women...
...seemed to take more pleasure in the spectacle of people and things that went blam! in the night: Fatal Attraction, The Untouchables, Lethal Weapon, Predator. Oh, there were cop comedies (Beverly Hills Cop II, the No. 1 hit, and Stakeout and Dragnet) and a devil comedy (The Witches of Eastwick) and an oddly amoral Michael J. Fox comedy (The Secret of My Success -- sort of Wall Street for the Smurf set). But all these films traded in physical or emotional degradation; they left an acrid aftertaste. One began to wonder how long Hollywood could continue to cash...