Word: lads
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Tony's precocious third-grade essay, "Why I Would Hate to Be a Basement," has long been enshrined in local lore, but his early academic promise has led only to idle fancying. Miss Doubloon, the lad's current teacher, explains to his anxious parents: "He would rather read novels in which the characters toy with a little Brie while waiting for their friends to turn up along the boulevard. If we can't get Anthony to concentrate, and hard, on the War of 1812 and obtuse triangles-" The pupil interrupts: "Like the dumb postmaster and his wife...
...memories of Saturday Night Fever suggest, Badham can be more than a high-tech hardware merchant. The first portions of WarGames are nearly irresistible. The reason that the mighty WOPR comes across as funny is that David, a bright high school lad (played by a very savvy young actor, Matthew Broderick, 21), accidentally makes contact with it while fooling around with his home computer. Boy and machine get to be friends, since they are both lonely and misunderstood. David is shy and sweet with his girlfriend (Ally Sheedy) but is wary of his parents and is a troublemaker in school...
Badham gets a lot of distracting colored lights and video screens flashing madly while the lad works against a deadline to talk his electronic pal out of launching a preventive strike against the U.S.S.R. But, as with the end of Blue Thunder, there is more of technique than of conviction in this work. It may be that Badham is an exemplary case: yet another talented craftsman caught up in Hollywood's current belief that the big bucks are in the big-bang school of moviemaking. In War Games the search for a big, effects-laden finish does not render...
...Jean-Claude arrives wearing a heavy coat of wistfulness atop his natural Gallic charm. His mother, you see, has died of Segal's syndrome (named after the author of Love Story, in whose calculating and sentimental mind this new imposition first arose), and all that stands between the lad and orphanhood is Bob Beckwith's willingness to do the decent thing by getting his wife and daughters to accept the boy. The issue is never much in doubt, since Martin Sheen plays this humanities professor as if his subject were actually humanitarianism. As the wife, Blythe Danner does...
Bacon, a notably venturesome and versatile young actor, wavers in and out of a Scottish brogue but ably blends charm, petulance, wit and selfishness as a would-be artist who counts on his talent to lift him up. Penn persuasively portrays a clever lad who is so defeated that he cannot imagine a light, or even an end to the tunnel. The two young men's high-kicking, cruel humor works better in the play's free-form first act than in the second, which is overladen with plot. But at every moment they capture the futile bravado...