Word: irishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...LEFT FOOT. Christy Brown was a poor lad who battled cerebral palsy to become a painter and author. Daniel Day-Lewis' triumph is nearly as spectacular: to play Christy with a streak of fierce, black-Irish humor -- and without a drop of TV-movie treacle...
...Irish will put up a good fight, even when they're shadowboxing. So Christy Brown had a head start in his battle against petrifying cerebral palsy. There were other crippling odds to buck. He was the tenth of 22 children born to a sod-poor Dublin bricklayer. For the first nine years of Christy's life, his siblings tended him as they would a houseplant: feed it, water it and keep it out of the way. Only his mother dared nurture him with her fierce, uncompromising love, and one day Christy stuck a piece of chalk in his left foot...
...Left Foot, Brown's autobiography about his hard-won emergence as a painter and author, could be meat for good drama or the sap in a TV-movie treacle pudding. This Irish film is mostly meat. Knowing that the audience will embrace Christy, the filmmakers are free to make him as stubborn as he is courageous. For Christy everything begins with will: the will to be understood, to do well things he would not be thought able to do at all and, later, to be loved by the pretty doctor who would only admire and inspire...
...story written in pain. As Christy's parents, Brenda Fricker and Ray McAnally are flinty, unrouged, splendid. And Daniel Day-Lewis' triumph is nearly as spectacular as Christy's: to reveal the blind fury in his eyes and stunted gestures, to play him with a streak of fierce, black-Irish humor. Brilliantly, Day-Lewis shows a mind, and then a man, exploding from the slag heap of Christy's body...
Speaking of the Irish, Lou Holtz's squad gets to play SMU on November 11. There's some tough scheduling for you. And this is a team that should win the national championship. Who are the Irish playing next? Columbia...