Word: hollywoodism
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...that was left to others). And in office, his occasional appeal to movie references--"Go ahead, make my day"--was uneasily balanced by a moral Puritanism that helped cement a post-Dixie South into his coalition. Clinton tried to make himself look hip. But he always seemed suppliant to Hollywood, as if he were trying to be cool by association, never quite escaping the nerd from Arkansas within. Arnold, in contrast, is a complete creature of the pop culture, aware of its internal contradictions and happy to play with them...
...might have heard, is within shouting distance of a masterpiece. Gonzalez Inarritu's English-language debut lacks the zigzagging drive of his Mexican hit Amores Perros and taxes credulity with its pileup of fatal coincidences. Mystic River has a case of wandering accents (sometimes South Boston, sometimes West Hollywood) and plods toward its conclusion more like a tired cop than a cunning detective. Its sharpest characters are the soft, doomed Dave, in a beautifully modulated turn by Robbins, and Jimmy's wife Annabeth, played by Laura Linney as Lady Bountiful on the outside, Lady Macbeth within...
...money he objects to. "I'm as anxious as anybody to find a cup at the end of the rainbow. You think of what you could do, not only in your work but also in your life and in other people's lives. But the Hollywood action picture of the past 20 years takes advantage of a very comfort-addicted audience base and puts them in a kind of hero dream. It says, 'You're the good guy, and the good guy not only shoots the bad guy, but he shoots him through the head, and 20 lbs. of gray...
Penn sees not a conspiracy but a fraternity between the minds that produce these films and those that gave us Gulf War II: Back to Iraq. Both, he says, are "blatant in their pursuit of dummifying the American public." He compares the Administration's Iraq ramp-up to a Hollywood preproduction meeting: "A good director tells you that you're going in to remap the Middle East. A bad director tells you you're going in for weapons that don't exist." And he is happy to keep speaking up--and listening. "I've had dialogue with Dennis Kucinich, with...
...tell jokes, improvise, do impressions--"He did it all" would be his epitaph. The older he got the more incandescent his talent became. He was a fireball of energy. He never seemed to sleep. By the 1950s he was cutting albums, making movies, strutting on Broadway and helling around Hollywood with the likes of Tony Curtis and Frank Sinatra...