Word: geniality
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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American movies are all talk, no listen. Jabber jabber, feint feint -- conversation is combat, a schoolyard dissing contest, a slightly more sophisticated version of "Your mother!" "No, yours!" In real life, and in French movies, people pretend to get along when they talk. They keep things light, genial, talking around the issues that burn them up inside. Some love affairs never begin because people are afraid to reveal what they feel; "I love you" is so hard to say. Some marriages can last a lifetime on the tacit agreement that hostilities will go unexpressed. The static is in the silences...
...well as their foot- and handholds. This makes for reasonably good fun. Director Harlin's only large mistake is staging the several violent deaths too authentically. They momentarily mar the high-speed implausibility of a movie that, like his Die Hard 2, agreeably combines the edgy and the genial...
...BOTTOM LINE: The author takes a genial, if predictable, view of a decaying Main Street and its farcical inhabitants...
Half the truth about small towns, much sentimentalized now that three-level regional malls with indoor waterfalls have replaced the towns as economic centers, is that they were wonderful, warm places where even the local drunk was part of the patchwork and where attention was paid. That's the genial view taken by novelist Richard Russo in The Risk Pool, Mohawk and his new book Nobody's Fool, three funny, loose-jointed yarns about backwater burgs in upstate New York. Doubtless it is contrary to recall the rest of the truth, which is that small towns were rigidly small-minded...
BOOKS Scott Turow's Pleading Guilty is irresistible. A genial fictional view of a decaying Main Street. THEATER An Irish classic travels well to the Caribbean. MUSIC Perry Farrell's Porno for Pyros takes a wild ride. Steve Reich previews the opera of the 21st century...