Word: facing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What does he have that separates him from the Brat Pack? He's not as lovely as Rob Lowe. He doesn't explode, on- or off-camera, as ripely as Sean Penn. "Tom is at a disadvantage," says Barry Levinson, his Rain Man director. "He's got a pretty face, so his abilities are underestimated. And he's not working a rebel image, which is associated with being a good actor." But he does have the image, in the films that made him famous, of an intense young man with a mission: the total workhorse, the ultimate party animal...
...finds his sex life over before it begins. In horrifying rants, he abuses his parents, his country and himself. This Ron is not a nice person or even, in his hippie garb, a nice-looking one. Moviegoers who expect to find the best of America in Cruise's face will instead discover a haunting mug shot of the nation's Viet Nam nightmare...
...Massapequa, Ron is now the flinching veteran used as a prop for patriotism, and family life is a ceaseless, sickening debate about the war. Even in Mexico, at a kind of seraglio for impotent veterans, he finds little sympathy among his own crippled kind. He looks into the angry face of his buddy Charlie (Willem Dafoe) and finds a mirror of his own grotesque despair. He has hit bottom...
...directorial decision was to choose Cruise. The actor remakes himself in the film, trashing preconceptions, showing a range that astonishes. Ron's furious arguments with his family become primal screams of frustrated love. In the Mexican scenes, where Ron meets a prostitute who treats him gently, Cruise's tearful face expresses wonderfully conflicting feelings of joy and fear, peace and release. He makes sense of the story even when the movie doesn't. No wonder that at the end of the filming, Kovic gave | Cruise his Bronze Star. "He gave it to Tom for bravery," Stone says, "for having gone...
Meanwhile, demonstrations in Bulgaria showed both the importance of updating the Atlantic alliance and the difficulty of drafting plans in the face of swiftly moving events. Continuing its plunge into reform, the Bulgarian Communist Party last week expelled Todor Zhivkov, its leader for 35 years, and announced that free elections would be held in May. When the parliament postponed until January a vote on ending the Communist Party's monopoly of power, 50,000 jeering protesters encircled the parliament building. As Josef Joffe, foreign editor of the Suddeutsche Zeitung, observed, "If only there weren't all these people...