Word: heroicizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Regardless of locale, most lawyer novels are easterns, in which the court system is a semicorrupt mess but the heroic judge/prosecutor/defense attorney finds the loophole that achieves justice. This one is a horseless, string-'em- up western whose message is that black hats are felonizing homesteaders and courts are run by sociobabbling liberals. Come back, Shane...
...Right Subject. Genius is one- tenth inspiration and nine-tenths obsession. Chaplin makes you think it is ten-tenths passivity, a matter of landing in the right place at the right time. So Richard Attenborough's film breaks new ground. Instead of casting Charlie Chaplin in an unnaturally heroic mold, it makes him a distracted twit who wanders through his life as if it belonged to someone else...
...Deneuve, Indochine has a star of epic glamour and gravity. Her acting craft gives heft to Eliane's gestures, each more heroic than the one before. Her ageless beauty makes Eliane convincing as both a young woman in love with Vietnam and a grandmother ready to raise another orphan and make it her own. In 1985 the actress was the model for the French national symbol Marianne. Deneuve's presence in Indochine is like some burnished monument to the French spirit miraculously preserved on the streets of Saigon...
...Dennis Haysbert is the mysterious black man she tries to befriend. Director Jonathan Kaplan (The Accused, Heart Like a Wheel) has the gifts of finding verve and ambiguity in TV-movie subjects and drawing beautiful interpretations from his lead actresses. As with Pfeiffer here. Her work is glamourless, subtle, heroic; her performance is a righteous heartbreaker...
...cops to a story about a wallet returned to an elderly mugging victim. The Angels have long been controversial, and some press reports allege Sliwa has yet to own up to all such misdeeds. Still, Sliwa says his honor is intact: "My reputation in New York was almost mythically heroic, and this is just a hard reality check." Hard indeed. He says his Angel wife Lisa launched a spinning, kung-fu kick at his face when he told her about his fabrications...