Word: franks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...small-time show biz, fading but persistent optimism is always engaged in a losing struggle with slowly metastasizing despair. Since Jack and Frank Baker (Jeff and Beau Bridges) are approaching middle age and still playing duo cocktail piano in Seattle's lesser lounges, an air of hopelessness has begun to hang heavy. Stardom is no longer an option; survival, even on the bottom rung, is becoming a question...
Banality is a security blanket for Frank. He has been playing the standards in a routine fashion for years, stitching the songs together with chipper- inane prattle as featureless as his musicianship. He's just a guy supporting his offscreen wife, kids and mortgage in a way he finds more congenial than, say, selling aluminum siding. Banality is a hair shirt for Jack. His life is all squalid improvisation and silent disgust at tinkling out "piano stylings." He knows better, and he might do better, as a jazzman...
...common ideals. The wary way in which she and Jack circle in on a relationship is one of the truest representations of modern romance that the modern screen has offered. The gradual stripping away of false issues between the brothers (Why is Jack always late for gigs? Why does Frank fuss so much about his bald spot?) as they get down to the true ones (involving, naturally, their childhood and piano lessons) is done with similar subtlety. Kloves' delicacy as a writer is, moreover, matched by his restraint as a director. It would have been easy to patronize or satirize...
...hours of what he described as "talks about talks" with three M.D.M.-affiliated antiapartheid campaigners, all of them rare visitors to Pretoria's Union Buildings, the seat of white rule: Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu; the Rev. Allan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches; and the Rev. Frank Chikane, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches...
SENIOR WRITERS: David Brand, Margaret Carlson, George J. Church, Richard Corliss, Otto Friedrich, Paul Gray, John Greenwald, Robert Hughes, Walter Isaacson, Ed Magnuson, Lance Morrow, Bruce W. Nelan, Frederick Painton, Walter Shapiro, R.Z. Sheppard, Frank Trippett...