Word: game
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...treading a middle path between spreading panic and making the public more alert," says TIME correspondent William Dowell. "Of course it's possible that nothing will happen, but there's also obviously a real threat." In public and behind the scenes, the stakes are rising in the waiting game between terrorists and the law, and at least one city is bowing...
...slack, ungainly; Ripley is more prey than predator. But the first three (recently issued in a hardcover omnibus by Knopf/Everyman's Library) have the tone of high, dark comedy. Tom kills--Dickie, Dickie's pal Freddie Miles, an American art lover, a bunch of mafiosi--as much for the game of eluding capture as for motives of profit or survival. In Ripley's Game he gets an ailing man involved in a murder plot only because the man once spoke abruptly to Tom. Then, when the man desperately tries to kill a Mafia goon, who shows up to help...
Everyone else in his movie is, by comparison, an easy construct--a TV host with a guilty secret; his damaged, drugged out daughter; game-show contestants, current and has-been, wrestling with the consequences of brief, cheesy fame; a bumbling cop betrayed by his good nature. These characters are all well played, but we don't fully connect with them. Or, finally, with an endless movie that mostly mistakes inflation for importance...
McGinley's relationship to the game is interesting. So is Lauren Holly's with the crippled quarterback, finally letting the inner bitch residing beneath her cool jock's-wife beauty savagely surface. The trouble with the movie is its style, all handheld shots and short, jagged cuts. They're supposed to represent the barely controlled anarchy of the sport (and to let Stone touch on far too many narrative points). But almost three hours of this jitter deteriorates from bravura filmmaking to annoying mannerism, and Any Given Sunday ends up less than the sum of its many, often interesting parts...
...face hidden by a paper-bag helmet, plays an improvised war game with toy soldiers on his kitchen table. An explosion startles him, the room bursts into flames, and a giant totes him out of the late 20th century and into 1st century Rome. Hence, the action will take place in both ages. Imperial warriors, caked with the dust of conquest, tramp through the Coliseum like bulky action figures. Their leader Titus (Hopkins) is a straight-spoken military man of the past; his rival, the emperor Saturninus (Cumming), is pure oil of modern politician, oozing endearments and threats, riding through...