Word: gimmicked
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...film) is about a nerdy sociopath who learns to channel his rage into an acceptable format: winning a spelling bee, playing golf or tackling football players. "You don't have what they call the social skills," he is told in The Waterboy; that is Sandler's gimmick and, for many, his charm. The plot is a competition for which our hero is utterly unqualified but which he always wins, over some smarmy exemplar of the status quo and in a climax tinged with sentiment and demagoguery. After a Sandler speech in Billy Madison, the principal sagely notes that "everyone...
Read about a new album from Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello and you can picture the record executives having a field day: the swinging songsmith meets the aging king of punk! Austin Powers plus Sid Vicious! Sex appeal and intellectual cachet! It must be a senseless gimmick just dying for a shot of arch hipness, you can practically assume. Another dud for the remainders bin. Fortunately for us, though, these songwriters have in fact crafted an album that is subtle, passionate and captivating. Pieced together by Bacharach and Costello during spare moments together in hotel suites on rented pianos...
Through a tough course of suppression and revelation, Winfrey finally got it right. This isn't a gimmick performance; it is genuine acting, and it abrades nicely against the more ingratiating characters in the ensemble. Her work will be called brave, but really it's canny; Oprah becoming the anti-Oprah will win deserved praise. Off camera, though, she was totally Oprah. Demme tells of an electrician on the crew who was in a deep depression over a family crisis. Winfrey, who didn't know the circumstances but could tell something was wrong, went to the man and hugged...
...hooker (Mary-Louise Parker) gets called in to service an old geezer, who promptly confesses that he had his first two wives killed. She flees into a closet, doors spin, and we are transported to the same room 20 years earlier--then 20 years before that. The time-travel gimmick is fun but hardly frivolous: the play explores matters of fate and free will, and the ability of people to control their own destiny. A clever and finally quite moving work...
Glenn's flight is a public relations gimmick. Nothing will be learned about the effects of space on aging. C. RALPH VERNO West Chester...