Word: heroisms
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...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...
...cheerleading slogan for Africa, coined by Tanzania's Julius Nyerere shortly after his country won its independence, was "We Must Run While They Walk." It caught the mood of euphoria and ambition, the dash of social heroism. Now the sense of heroic hope is mostly gone. Vast stretches of Africa are in worse shape than when they became independent. People routinely live at subsistence levels. Says Denys Lawrie, a mining consultant who works in West Africa: "Africans have wasted 20 years." The world's attention has gone elsewhere, and African leaders know their rations of aid will be smaller...