Word: gracefully
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...Just say no" TV fund raiser. Meanwhile, the President's sole black adviser (Robert Guillaume) overcomes his don't-rock-the-boat philosophy to rally opposition to the trade. Yet he finds that black activists are divided and posturing -- they greet his pleas for pragmatism with choruses of Amazing Grace. He does better with white business leaders ("What do you think I've been doing on these corporate boards all these years?"), who agree to finance an ad campaign against the deal once they realize they could lose their best customers for liquor, cigarettes and athletic shoes...
...Hoop Dreams" is the story of viscious "hopes" of cultural pathology and unrequited "dreams" of evanescent fame. There are moments of extraordinary grace along the way, some intimations of hope and the occasional tremendous jam. But these moments are fleeting. As long as these cycles keep on spinning and these misguided dreams are dreamt, there can be little hope for William Gates and Arthur Agee--of, for that matter...
Household names on the marquee do not, of course, guarantee dramatic splendor inside. The Branagh play is a trifle that searches for nightmare poetry in "plain old American-Irish English" and for political significance in the story of a Belfast punk (Paul Ronan) obsessed by the grit and grace of Jimmy Cagney. It finds none of the above, lost as it is in a muddle of moralizing and attitudinizing. But it shares a potent theme with the season's cannier off-Broadway ventures: that star worship is a virus, carried by the popular media and infecting anyone...
There has always been something bracing about such creatures, especially when no whiny attempts are made to justify their malignity. The grace that redeems a wretch like Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) in The Last Seduction is her breathtaking lack of hypocrisy. She's economic woman on an intricate and divinely sociopathic rampage. She just plain wants the money she steals from her husband (Bill Pullman), who obtained it in a drug deal that she had urged on him. She just plain needs to create a new life so she can hide from his wrath. And she just plain must enlist...
Most of Jimmy's unpleasantness is directed into torturing his well-bred wife Alison (Silje Nnand). Alison's beauty, grace and propriety are frustratingly unattainable to her husband, and she exacerbates the situation by ignoring his rantings. Normand masters a frenetic nervous tension that shows itself in everything she does, from a palsied hand to a tremulous voice. She portrays Alison's silent suffering exquisitely. As she stands at an ironing board in the opening scene, we are captivated by her penetrating eyes and intense concentration on her work. In her frightened, innocent loveliness, Normand's Alison truly...