Word: karle
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Thornton, you see, wants to have his box of chocolates and hack it to pieces, too. Directing his own self-scripted performance (did he cater it, too?), Thornton plays Karl Childers, a mildly retarded mental patient who, in his late thirties, is released back into the small Southern town he left twenty-five years before. That, you see, was the day he found Mama in bed with a neighbor and did a little number on them with the weapon of the title. Karl, though, is more half-baked than he is half-mad, the kind of convicted murderer who Didn...
...eyebrows are raised, then, when a single gal named Linda (Natalie Canerday) takes Karl in as company for said Frank (Lucas Black), her son. If this were a Hollywood movie, Karl would be hit by a beam of light, Babyface would croon a Tender Ballad, and Karl's newfound ability to learn Sanskrit in an hour would have Linda begging for more...
...beautifully felt performance behind that face ought to earn Thornton, who also wrote and directed Sling Blade, an Oscar nomination or two next week. The tale of Karl's return home after 25 years in a mental hospital, and of the awful temptations to repeat his crime, has already turned the actor into Hollywood's guy du jour. Clint Eastwood, Elizabeth Taylor, Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise are vocal fans of the film, and Thornton's fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton is expected to screen it at the White House soon. A perennial supporting player, Thornton is now getting fat roles...
...Karl, a poignant, complicated character, came to Thornton on the set of a cable movie, 1987's The Man Who Broke 1,000 Chains. "It was hot," he says, "and I had a conductor's uniform on with a collar up to here. My part wasn't going well because the director wanted me to overact. At lunch I was thinking how everyone else on the set was a real actor and I was a nobody. I started making faces at myself in the mirror and started talking in that voice. I looked so goofy, I just went, Eeeewegh. Then...
...Malvern kid is Razorback royalty now, but he's shy of the Oscar talk. "I have a little of a small-town-guy inferiority complex," he says, "so I think that kind of thing couldn't happen to me." Well, get used to the kudos, Billy Bob. You and Karl--the man and the face--deserve no less...