Word: finch
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck, and earned Mulligan his only Oscar nomination - had an immediate and lasting impact. Back then it provided a Hollywood echo of the civil rights agitation that had roiled the South and seized the nation. But Peck's role as Atticus Finch, a crusading attorney who is also a gentle single dad to his two young kids, had staying power. In 2003 the American Film Institute chose Atticus as the top hero in U.S. movie history. (See TIME's All-Time 100 Best Movies...
...Mulligan, who died Saturday at 83 of heart disease, had been Finch's gentle shepherd, and deserved at least a share of Peck's Oscar both for casting him and for eliciting the actor's best work. But the director's heart, here as in so many of his films, was with the Finch children. If Mulligan had an abiding interest, it was troubled youngsters on the cusp of discovering themselves by confronting the world around them. This theme occupied him from his first feature film to his last. The 1957 Fear Strikes Out gave Anthony Perkins his first lead...
...heard of Huckleberry Finn? Gone With the Wind?) The novel is set in rural South Carolina in 1964, which is just about the time it would have automatically been turned into an Oscar-nominated movie. The obvious reference point is To Kill a Mockingbird, whose girl narrator, Scout Finch, is 6 to Lily's 14, and whose fictional setting is Maycomb, Ala., instead of Bees' Tiburon, S.C. But that was back when most big films tended to serious sentiment. Today, the dominant tone is irreverence, sarcasm, facetiousness. Can a time-capsule movie like this one have any resonance today...
...Even before the game, Finch's mind was muddled. "We've fought it, we've fought it, we've fought it for so long," she says of softball's inevitable Olympic extinction. "But on the drive up, knowing this could be it, you can't fight it anymore." She never got a chance to fight for the gold. Candrea started lefty Cat Osterman to match up against Japan, which had seven southpaws in the starting lineup. Was Finch disappointed? "I would be lying if I said no," says Finch, before quickly adding that she supports Candrea...
...didn't throw, but the loss still stings. Plus, Finch is feeling guilty about U.S. softball's demise. Really? Finch, who has spent more time promoting her sport than anyone on the planet? She blames herself for some of this mess? "I do," she says. "I hold that responsibility. Being an Olympic softball player, what more can I do? Lisa Fernandez, Dot Richardson, the many greats, they've done so much, and now it's our turn. And what did we do with the torch? So yeah, you do feel let down. Those many girls, they don't look...