Word: gang
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...writing and directing efforts, with heart-in-the-right-place primitivism. That is not necessarily a defect in movies that depend for effectiveness on walloping blows to the audience's emotional solar plexus. Stallone is unabashedly faithful to his character and his friends. The old gang is reassembled. Talia Shire is freshly steadfast and inspirational as Rocky's wife Adrian, Burgess Meredith is back as the wizened trainer Mickey and Burt Young as the earthy brother-in-law Paulie. Carl Weathers reprises his wily Apollo Creed. It is all durable and somehow innocent. There are no crooked managers...
...lasting damage. Breslin's ability to entertain is another matter. His Archie Bunker accent and appearance as a working-class wide body put him in beer commercials and a movie. It was not too hard to parlay his writing talents into popular hardbacks. His fiction to date: The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, a spoof of the Mafia; World Without End, Amen, the travels of a New York Irish policeman to warring Northern Ireland; and .44 (written with Dick Schaap), a novelized exploitation of the Son of Sam murders...
...alien territory of theaters, there is something comfortable, even old-shoeish, about the new film, a sense, appropriate to its theme of coming to terms with middle age, that all aboard are pleasurably rediscovering their best selves. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley and the rest of the gang on the bridge and, lest we forget, Scotty (James Doohan) down there in the engine room-have all matured gracefully. They now have the air of people who have done something in which they can take a decent pride. One leaves the film neither hugely thrilled nor greatly awed, but with...
...more sinister CIA agent, recently drowned under suspicious circumstances. Manfred's son (by Susan's mother) is either in a Chilean prison or dead. Susan's twin sister Miriam pops up when the story needs her; she is still scarred from being raped by a motorcycle gang and tortured by the Shah's secret police in Iran. She and her current lover, a Vietnamese refugee, have an infant son named Edgar Allan...
...films succeeded because of their simplicity and unpretentiousness, charming audiences with principled, determined if not effect, heroes,. Moreover, each film's creativity compensated for its simple theme by introducing a wide range of supporting players. Rocky's stable of encouragers and Travolta's gang of side-kicks may have seemed two-dimensional, but they nevertheless fashioned likable, charming and fresh personalities...