Word: harridan
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...daughter's job on feminist grounds and vows to stop the production. Not a bad idea - turning Mom into a real-life counterpart of a horror-film stalker - but her character (at least in Lusia Strus's over-the-top performance) is too much of a shrieking harridan from the start, and neither Moore nor director Josh Hecht manage to make the farcical revenge plot pay off. But a little reworking might do wonders for this promisingly pulpy play...
...deserved better scripts than she got. In Edgar G. Ulmer's meat-B noir classic Detour (1945), Ann Savage, 87, invested her sharp features and scraping-chalk voice in, unquestionably, the harshest, most conniving bitch in movie history. More than 60 years later, Guy Maddin cast her as another harridan-hellion - his mother - in the recent "docu-fantasia" My Winnipeg...
...Miranda (Michelle Monaghan), who's all the things Lila isn't: brunette, natural and unmarried. Eddie is warmed by her sporty friendliness, especially in contrast to the harridan convalescing in his hotel bedroom. He even likes most of her family, who come to the resort each year. As Eddie and Miranda fall in love, he never quite gets around to explaining he's on his honeymoon. But when the truth is revealed, he declares his fidelity, telling her folks, "From the second I fell in love with Miranda, I have not once cheated on her with my wife...
...meatiest role, and the meat was deliciously rancid, was opposite Jose Ferrer in The Shrike, where she's the harridan who nearly drives her husband to suicide. Her performance was both stark and nicely judged - "good (and nasty)," Thomson says, approvingly - but it didn't vault Allyson into the realm of Serious Actress. It didn't set her on a new, thornier path, paving the way for her to play roles suitable for the decades to come, when the Wife role would be replaced by the Woman With a Past. Casting directors thought only of Allyson's past...
...those who work for her. She is not quite as creative a policy thinker as her husband, but she easily masters difficult issues-her newfound grasp of military matters has impressed colleagues of both parties on the Armed Services Committee-and she is not even vaguely the left-wing harridan portrayed by the Precambrian right. I also think that a Clinton presidential candidacy in 2008 would be a disaster on many levels...