Word: kilmer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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GORE VIDAL'S BILLY THE KID (TNT, May 10, 8 p.m. EDT). Turns out he wasn't such a bad kid after all. The author of Burr and Lincoln re-examines the legendary Western outlaw (Val Kilmer) in a made-for-cable movie...
...Profumo affair that moves with a pop historian's revisionist swagger and plays like News of the World headlines set to early '60s rock 'n' roll. Taking a cue from Asquith's Pygmalion, the film casts Ward (John Hurt) as an aristocratic makeover artist, discovering Keeler (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) in the fetid anonymity of a Soho strip club and turning her into a star of the jet-set slumming circuit. Pluck your eyebrows, Christine. Wet your lips. Come over and say hi to Jack Profumo...
Despite a lovely cameo turn by Burt Lancaster, Field of Dreams is the male weepie at its wussiest. There is poetry in baseball, sure, but it is not shaggy doggerel of the Joyce Kilmer stripe: "I think that I shall ne'er remark/ A cornfield green as Fenway Park." It comes in the concrete poetry of a Bill James statistical analysis, or in the sprung rhythm of a Roger Angell paragraph. Or in the flight of a ball from the pitcher's hand toward the catcher's glove, with a million delicious options at stake...
...dwarfs, a young farmer put in charge of the infant who is destined to deliver his land from the terrible rule of Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh). On his journey to Castle Nockmaar, he acquires a few worthy friends and foes: an outlaw warrior in the Han Solo mold (Val Kilmer), a dashing knight with Lando Calrissian's righteous swagger (Gavan O'Herlihy), a willful princess with martial guile (Joanne Whalley), a Yoda-like wizard (Billy Barty), an ancient sorceress -- Obi-Wan Kenobi's kid sister, perhaps -- struggling under a curse (Patricia Hayes) and a couple of impish brownies reminiscent...
...Lucas film will have vagrant charms. Davis is ingratiating. So is Julie Peters playing his wife, as patient as Penelope. Director Ron Howard (Splash, Cocoon) gets the social politics of the dwarfs' village right, but he is not adept at action scenes: some are too busy; others are botched. Kilmer tries hard in a role that might have fit Mel Gibson like an iron glove, and Whalley, teen angel of the serious British mini-series (The Edge of Darkness, The Singing Detective) is wasted as the heroine. Both Kilmer and Whalley, in fact, are curiously irrelevant to the climactic battle...