Word: funs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...streetwise Scrooge. "Somebody's gotta be the heavy," he sings in his opening number, and old Ebenezer had better be that some body. Hines is well supported by the rest of a large and obviously happy cast, and if all ghosts were as finger-snapping fun ny as Saundra McClain (Christmas Present), being haunted would be more a dream than a nightmare. Yet the highest praise of all has to go to Robin Wagner, whose sets, as clever and as intricate as Chinese boxes, encompass half of 125th Street. Wagner was the unseen star of such mediocre musicals...
Unfortunately, the fun comes to a screeching halt when Gideon re-enacts Fosse's heart attack. Though it is daring for a film maker to dramatize his own brush with death, Fosse does not so much confront his own mortality as trivialize it. His usual grab bag of show-biz metaphors is not equal to the dramatic tasks at hand. Indeed, some of Fosse's conceits are embarrassing. An angel of death (Jessica Lange) trots in and out to recite banal Freudian explanations of Gideon's workaholism and promiscuous sexuality. Ben Vereen and dancers in cardiovascular body...
...mood is taking a toll is the fact that Americans have begun to write advice columnists about the problems that all the cautions cause. Warnings about cholesterol in eggs, nitrate in bacon, caffeine in coffee (and, a while back, risky chemicals in even the decaffeinated variety) have sapped the fun out of eating breakfast for some people, it seems. Wrote one such: "I'd try bread and water, but I'm pretty sure that as soon as I begin to enjoy it, I'll find...
While there are some amusing moments in 1941, there is none of the spontaneity that makes for fun. The movie's premise is as overblown as its execution. 1941 seems to be composed of ill-matched parts of The Russians Are Coming, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Animal House, The War of the Worlds and I Wanna Hold Your Hand (also written by the Lorraine team of Zemeckis and Gale). Set around Los Angeles right after Pearl Harbor, the film shows what might have happened if panicky Californians had convinced themselves that they were under...
Such in-joking helps distinguish Looking for Work from the 8 trillion or so recent novels about young women trying to find themselves. The chief point of the exercise seems to be fun. No matter how much she protests, Salley is a confirmed flibbertigibbet, her name itself an amusingly pointless steal from a poem by Yeats ("Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet"). Life has given her every advantage, including just the right number of trendy neuroses. Though she claims to spend a large portion of her story job hunting, what she really looks...