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...psycho's attentions, that is brave, flashy and riveting. It is brave because she plays a woman on the shady side of 50 who hides neither her wrinkles nor the temperamental manipulativeness so common among aging stars; flashy because, besides singing and dancing, she trades in high-gloss show-biz bitchery that sometimes approaches the level of All About Eve; riveting because she shows a touching vulnerability about her professional and personal insecurities (she is torching for her ex-husband, played by James Garner). Bacall may or may not be playing Bacall, but who cares? She is obviously...
...invariably, according to the agents who must take care of them, requiring advice about apartments, gynecologists and boyfriends. They learn to distinguish the Seychelles from the Maldives, and they learn about vacation houses in Marrakesh. They learn to eat Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with foie gras, and then, when the gloss they have acquired begins to shine through the lens of a Hasselblad, they fly back to New York, perhaps by now not wearing blue jeans, and have another try at the big tune...
WELCOME to Tasty Meadows, the middle-American MunchkinLand where the massive shopping center is the primary gathering place, where television-watching is the favorite pasttime, and where the sun-always shining--seems to reflect off everything, creating a glaring, ultra-gloss sheen on car fenders, carefully-groomed, Brillcreamed coiffures, and the flourescent polyester suits of the cheery citizenry. Here, America's real ordinary people great each other with advertising slogans: "Hi, you should try this new fertilizer on your lawn, it's terrific!" "How are you? Have you ever seen our boat shine like this? It's new Boatsheen...
...Cronenberg delivers. When the body of one of his characters turns on its owner, it does so with a sanguinary vengeance. In Scanners, the Force flings men against walls, drives them to shotgun suicide, creeps inside their muscles and works its way out. This last special effect is a gloss of the sequence in Altered States in which William Hurt's face and arms assumed grotesque simian form (Makeup Wizard Dick Smith worked on both films): but Cronenberg goes beyond Altered States, beyond fantasy and physiognomy, for a climax that is literally mind blowing...
Presidential debates compel both men to gloss over their miscalculations, exaggerate their strengths, try to lure the other one into error, in order to emerge in the eyes of the public at large as a "winner." All of these objectives so coveted in television performances are the opposite of the qualities so vital to Executive deliberation and diplomatic negotiation...