Word: humanize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that's pretty much it for his performance. Of course, an actor is hard pressed to create a characterization when all he has to play against is gunshots and explosions. Any actor deserves sympathy when his love interest is sequestered from him, his nemeses are without human interest, his potential allies are all idiots, and the only sensible figure on the scene (Reginald Veljohnson) is always a walkie-talkie away. Still, Willis' presence is whiny and self-involved, and it is a ludicrous error to have him stop to confess past insensitivities before effecting his wife's climactic rescue. That...
Fitzgerald might have been less intimidated beforehand had he realized how well his hostess understood human insecurities and frailties. "Goodbye, goodbye," she had written Fullerton in 1908. "Write or don't write, as you feel the impulse -- but hold me long & close in your thoughts. I shall take up so little room, & it's only there that I'm happy!" She was then internationally renowned but also trapped in a long, misbegotten marriage to / Edward R. (Teddy) Wharton, a hale fellow and manic-depressive whom her good friend Henry James suspected of being "cerebrally compromised." On the other hand...
Clancy's characters, including his solid mahogany hero, are not especially interesting. There is no sex at all, and generally not much human contact beyond the kind that requires a salute or a karate chop. On the other hand, the author has kept up with shifts of attitude in the U.S., and not every Kremlin big shot is portrayed as an evil-empire builder. He has not anticipated the end of the Afghan war, and the Pentagon procurement scandal is not foreshadowed. Complicated weapons systems usually work, and no U.S. military officer or enlisted person is less than true blue...
...Roger Angell and Thomas Boswell, each baseball career is a study in literature. An ironic short story might be apt for the rookie whose only appearance in a big league box score comes at the tag end of a lost season. A sonnet would be fitting commemoration for those human meteors who flash across the big league sky and then flame out, their promise unkept. My four graybeard survivors, of course, deserve nothing less than full-length novels, sprawling Victorian epics that carry them from apple-cheeked anticipation to adult acclaim to the agonies of aging abilities...
...Picasso into a symbolic context--showing him to be alternately creator, then destroyer. But any biography with so rigid a framework invariably paints a black-and-white picture of the person it seeks to portray. To Huffington, Picasso was a destroyer and his art a negation of human values. Her evidence for this, however, is not drawn from the vast body of Picasso's works; it comes from the bitter testimony of the artist's former lovers and friends. His sex life, it would seem, was the expression of Picasso's true soul...