Word: elan
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...sunrise every morning in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, the Shanker family gets ready for work. Steven Shanker, 37, and his wife Avima, 35, wake their two sons, Elan, 5, and Dannel, 2, for a hurried breakfast of cereal and orange juice. After the meal Avima heads off by 7:30 to her job as an engineer at Librascope, a computer firm. Then, as other pinstriped parents up and down the San Fernando Valley march out to their cars with groggy children in tow, Steven, a vice president at Union Bank in nearby Monterey Park, drives the boys...
Like the other players, Grodin gives a nicely calibrated performance as the itch his captor cannot afford to scratch too vigorously. But it is De Niro's work that redeems an inherently improbable plot. He handles guns, quips and tight spots with the requisite elan. He brings something else to the part too: a deftly imagined sense of hard roads traveled before he hit this one, of a past lived, not just alluded to. When you root for him, you root for a man, not a killing machine...
...record in English, and, with collaboration from the likes of Elvis Costello, Sting and, most formidably, Lou Reed, he has fashioned eleven songs that range wide and pierce deep, all sharing a similar theme. "Violence is love gone crazy" is the way he puts it, with the same snazzy elan and offhand humor that make him such an affable and adept screen actor. He seems easy with it all: sweeping rock, laid-back jazz, Latin-inflected pop. Recently he reflected on the album on a film set in Hamilton, Mont., where he is starring in a caper comedy called Waiting...
...such famed "classic" authors provides the product with the kind of elan and credibilty no living writer ever could. And while dead authors are not around to endorse merchandise (Can you picture this: "Hi! My name is Herman Melville, and I never go out on whaling expeditions without bringing my American Express Gold Card...) a quote or a reference easily and elegantly invokes their mystique...
...alternately superior and self-pitying, especially with a sympathetic older colleague (Swoosie Kurtz) at the New Yorker-like magazine where both work. The fact that his mother loved him but died does not really excuse him. The fact that Fox brings the sympathy he has won, and the comic elan he has perfected, on television cannot restore Jamie to our good graces. The fact that James Bridges is a hopelessly unimaginative director finishes Jamie off. In the wake of this film's failure, one begins pondering Bright Lights, Big City's last line on McInerney's behalf: "You will have...