Word: icons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Faced with so cheerless a life, some Iranians have been staging something of a cultural revolution within their own homes. The focus of this underground world is that icon of blithe energy, Michael Jackson. On the black market in Tehran, his cassettes fetch up to $50, and videotapes of the Gloved One rent for up to $100 a night. Many houses regularly become covert discos. In response, detachments of Islamic Guards, acting on informers' tips, have been raiding homes and confiscating tapes. The government apparently fears that the Jackson clubs could influence Iranian youth to turn against the regime...
...peaceful day in Botswana's Kalahari desert, where the Bushmen live, a Coca-Cola bottle fell from the sky. It must, they thought, be a gift from the gods. But this glass icon brought with it the compulsions of civilization: greed, jealousy, rancor. So the family patriarch determined to take the bottle to the end of the world and drop it off. On his journey he saw the strangest things: beasts with round legs (Jeeps), and a female with strange skins on her back (the village schoolteacher), and a squad of shiftless African guerrillas. The gods must be crazy...
...between." Author Umberto Eco, 52, has long contemplated the many kinds of laughter, including recently the all-the-way-to-the-bank kind. The awesome success of his medieval-monastery mystery, The Name of the Rose, has turned the scholarly Italian professor of semiotics into an international literary icon. During an autumn promotional tour of the U.S. last week, he delighted an audience of New York City fans, but deftly declined to interpret the meaning of his work. Eco did talk about the pressures of fame and fortune. "I used to think that financial success would enable me to pursue...
Until a climax too calculated to stir the emotions, Screenwriter William D Wittliff and Director Richard Pearce navigate a careful, dogged course between tract and treacle. In this near-miss movie Shepard is once again the icon of incorruptibility who refuses to claim the center of a film. Toward the end of Country Shepard's character disappears, with little explanation, in what may be a gentlemanly bow to Jessica Lange, a flinty, landsomely wasted matriarch. Mother ones, meet Ma Joad. -By Richard Corliss...
...hero. The textbook Mozart, embalmed in immortality, comes raucously alive as a punk rebel, grossing out the Establishment, confuting his chief rival, working himself to death in an effort to put on paper songs no one else can hear. Who among us cannot sympathize, even identify, with such an icon of iconoclasm? In real life we may all be Salieris, but we can respond to a movie that tells us we are really Mozarts...