Word: heroism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Americans are desperately concerned about the corrupting effects of the mass culture on their children. They are rightly aroused by grade school curriculums that present homosexuality as just another life-style choice. They know instinctively that single parenthood, for all the heroism it summons from women, is the surest path to childhood poverty. They want to rebuild "family values" -- but they refuse to see the rebuilding as an act of religious war. And when they hear their concerns transmuted into appeals to intolerance, they tune...
...MOST GLORIOUS COMIC ACTING ON film, Peter O'Toole played a washed-up swashbuckling movie star, raddled with debauchery yet oddly innocent. The man journeyed hours to glimpse an estranged daughter but did not dare speak to her and dismissed his screen heroism as fakery until he thrillingly discovered that it, like all art, came from deep within. The barren Broadway musical of MY FAVORITE YEAR, which opened last week, turns O'Toole's holy hellion into a soulless self-pitier (a deft if charmless Tim Curry) and wrongly presumes that the film's appeal was its setting amid...
...ferocious associate, unconsciously by a fearsome opponent. The former is Lieut. Commander Joanne Galloway (a marvelously intense Demi Moore, acting as if she's never read Vanity Fair, let alone appeared on its cover). Instinctively sensing that a cover-up is in the making, she keeps hectoring Kaffee toward heroism. The antagonist is Colonel Nathan R. Jessep, Marine commander at Gitmo, not so much played as demonized by Jack Nicholson -- a wickedly smart psychopath, utterly self-confident and self-righteous. Nicholson sees the humor in this dark character but then freezes each potential laugh with a gaze that is hostile...
...surreality and blend of grim politics and show-biz glitter. But unlike Cabaret, which used a Berlin nightclub for satiric comment on the rise of the Nazis, Kiss looks to shadowy passages from old movies for sentimental uplift. They suggest that art, more than life, teaches decency and heroism...
...really, though Gene and Dean are no slouches at the music. Their talent has been subverted to a higher purpose, what Sacvan Berkovitch might call the Myth of Rock. While other bands try purge themselves of the excesses of rock and roll, Ween wallows in inane lyrics and guitar heroism and overblown sound effects. They don't deny that rock is bullshit; their music celebrates it. On vinyl, this means double albums, and songs imitating anyone and everyone: their first album, God Ween Satan--the Oneness, features an eight-minute Prince cover, a 20-second sendup of John Fogarty...