Word: freundlich
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...prime time, he will never seem ready for it. In NBC's new comedy Lateline (Tuesdays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.), a spoof of Nightline, the Saturday Night Live veteran (Remember "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me"?) plays the indefatigable correspondent Al Freundlich as a mixture of Jeff Greenfield's best-boy-in-class earnestness and Sam Donaldson's bouncy intensity. In this week's premiere, under the mistaken impression that he's replacing narcissistic anchor Pearce McKenzie (appealingly pompous Robert Foxworth), Freundlich orders up the Pope as his first guest and decides...
...specific enough to Nightline to satirize the genre but general enough to life to tap the comic angst of the human condition. Watch, and you'll see one from each of the major office types: the tightly coiled executive producer (played by Miguel Ferrer of Twin Peaks), who humors Freundlich with drunken promises of future anchordom written on a cocktail napkin; the booker (Sanaa Lathan), who reports that the Pontiff is unavailable but she has on hold the guy who shot him. There's Gale, who ridicules Freundlich's melodramatic pauses but turns down an on-air spot with another...
...least as far as this fall's movie crop is concerned. Close on the heels of the high-powered but uneven A Thousand Acres, and preceding The House of Yes and the much-anticipated The Ice Storm, comes the The Myth of Fingerprints, the debut feature of writer/director Bart Freundlich...
...Freundlich invokes the Chekhovian in both his unsentimental depiction of each family member's half-comic, half-pathetic weaknesses and his deliberate avoidance of a cinematically neat closure. Unfortunately, his script falls short of making the characters sufficiently three-dimensional to earn our empathy. We really learn only one or two things about each of them: that Warren's never gotten over his breakup with Daphne; that Jake's still struggling to say "I love you" to Margaret; and that Leigh hasn't outgrown being the baby of the family, though she's found time for an unaccountable but placid...
...visually stark setting--Maine in the winter--oppresses with a further sense of isolation and remoteness. Perhaps intended as a part of Freundlich's tranche-de-vie attempt at a Thanksgiving that could really happen, this environment doesn't help us connect to the characters we watch trudging back and forth across the snow. While The Myth of Fingerprints should be commended for studiously avoiding a Hollywood treatment of the family drama, it can't quite conceal that where substance is wanting, it doesn't matter whether the surface is glossy or gritty...