Word: grits
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...secret of Hustle & Flow's appeal is that it's a conventional dream movie with a realistic surface--a marshmallow dipped in grit. With its muddy color palette, the film looks as if it has been painted on velvet. But the plot is pure wish fulfillment. DJay gets transformed from no-gooder to go-getter by beautiful music (when he's moved to tears by a church choir). Then there's the Rocky factor. That movie, about a bum turned hero, was a happy pill after the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. Brewer sees his film as a return...
...piece of NASCAR ingenuity already deployed in Iraq: the layers of clear plastic sheets on the front of race-car windshields, which crews can quickly tear off each time oil or grit obstructs the driver's view. Similar Mylar sheets are now used on Black Hawk helicopters, whose windshields in the past had to be routinely replaced after getting pitted by desert sand. A set of layered sheets, which costs $1,100, is a lot cheaper than the $15,000 windshields. Could an invasion of flashy logos be far behind...
...shrewdest analysts of the industry are directors without intellectual pretensions. Henry Hathaway (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer; True Grit) watches Darryl Zanuck turn misogynism into money: "In the early days we always had as a leading man . . . elegant, fashionable men who had good speaking voices. And Darryl said . . . 'Women love bums!' He took all the heavies; Bogey was a heavy; when he picked Clark Gable, Gable was playing a heavy . . . Richard Widmark . . . was the worst . . . heavy in the world . . . And it's still true. Look at the Burt Reynolds and the Clint Eastwoods and all of that crap coming...
...cyclonic force across the plains of eastern Colorado. It moves as a solid wall of dust, opaque and hard on the nerves of any ill-informed motorist it happens to catch. All a fool can do in these circumstances is listen to the finish of the car being grit-blasted away. Even with the windows closed, the dirt piles up on the dashboard and gathers in the folds of clothes and collects on the tongue. Coming as it does right out of the blue, a windstorm of such muscle is enough to give the intestate a remorseful heart...
...Warner Bros. to become one of Hollywood's most durable, successful producers and whose more than 400 movies included lame-brained vehicles for Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis as well as such classics as Little Caesar (1930), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), The Rainmaker (1956) and True Grit (1969); of complications from diabetes; in Rancho Mirage, Calif. A moviemaker without eccentricities who could cut a deal as deftly as he cut a film, Wallis hid under his phlegmatic manner a keen intelligence and an uncanny eye for talent. Among his discoveries: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Shirley MacLaine...