Word: lad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...homely as a turtle without its shell yet eventually proves as beautiful as an enchanted frog, must find a rescuer. And the rescuer must be a child, whose Galahad strength only E.T. and the moviegoer can immediately discern. The child is Elliott (Henry Thomas), a thin, quiet, wise-faced lad of ten who makes initial contact in a time-honored American fashion: by playing catch with a softball. With the help of his older brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and younger sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore), Elliott must battle the elements and some prying adults in a children's crusade...
...Gray on '50s TV. O'Brien's sad-eyed face, a Keane portrait with angst, told moviegoers that even if Phyllis Thaxter were your mother or Judy Garland your big sister, childhood could be an unending melotrauma of nightmares and broken ideals. Gray was the winsome lad, then the sturdy teen-ager of Father Knows Best; he navigated adolescence like a middle-class Huck Finn. O'Brien and Gray were natural, winning, resourceful actors who took both their craft and their function as role models seriously. Their like has not been seen since-and, sibling...
Wackford Squeers, the scurvy headmaster from Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, has trouble with enrollment-his students keep starving on him. He could use Clark Brandon, who plays high school apprentice to Barnard Hughes' Mr. Merlin (CBS, Wednesdays at 8 p.m.). Brandon is a comely lad-in the androgynous, Los Angelized tradition of former teen throbs like David Cassidy-but his character lacks character. Squeers' spartan regimen and unspared rod could provide...
Time Bandits'premise would suit the most wide-eyed space opera: an imaginative English lad finds six dwarfs tumbling out of his bedroom closet one night and accompanies them on their adventures through time and space. But the movie undercuts any involvement in the tale by stopping dead for long derisory skits featuring Napoleon (Ian Holm), Robin Hood (John Cleese) and Agamemnon (Sean Connery). It misuses Holm's talents, underuses Cleese's and doesn't use Connery at all-there's no way to turn him into a figure of antic misanthropy. The film finally...
When C.P. Snow was an eight-year-old in the drab Midlands city of Leicester, he read about the atom in a children's encyclopedia. An atom, the credulous lad was told, resembles the ulterior of a cathedral, in which tennis balls-the electrons-bounce about violently. This fanciful account gave the factory clerk's son "the first sharp mental excitement I ever had." He never quite got over...