Word: hollywoodizations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Left, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Evil Dead, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, the new film makes a virtue of its seeming artlessness. A picture's dead air, ragged acting and extreme shifts of emotional tone throw the viewer off balance. This is not your standard Hollywood movie, whose technical finesse reassures even as it excites. The bizarro indie horror films seem unmediated, out of control, a blurred or garish snapshot of lunacy. It's as if the footage had been found, a year later, and all that's left is a grainy record of awful happenings...
...existential burdens shared by all humankind. For instance, the deep pain you suffer when someone swipes your reserved space in the studio parking lot. That this particular human tragedy surfaces in two new series--Showtime's Beggars and Choosers and Fox's forthcoming Action--is emblematic of Hollywood's new favorite subject: itself...
Which may be just what we want to hear. In essence, these shows say about the famous what soap operas say about the rich--that they're no better than we are, probably less happy, possibly less moral. Audiences today have a love-to-hate relationship with Hollywood and the media; we've supported Beavis and Butt-head's meta-media sarcasm and David Letterman's roasting of TV bigs. It's a short step from a late-night joke about CBS chief Les Moonves to the name dropping that has become easy punch-line fodder on even bland fare...
...Hollywood, as we all know, runs on high hopes and impossible dreams, which just often enough--about once in a thousand times--come true. But at a certain level, it also runs on cold pizza, unpaid phone bills and scripts by people for whom English is a second language. It's at this latter level that Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin), who operates Bowfinger International Pictures out of his ratty bungalow, scrounges along...
They are a wonderfully rum lot and include an ingenue fresh off the bus from Ohio (Heather Graham) who doesn't know much about Hollywood except that a girl is supposed to sleep her way to the top, which she's up for; a failed leading lady (Christine Baranski), boldly living out her frustrated dreams of Method acting in all the wrong places; and a production crew composed of illegal aliens who start out not knowing one end of the camera from the other and end up in learned discussions of how Fellini or Orson Welles might have shot...