Word: lear
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...Norman Lear, the TV mogul and co-founder of the liberal group People for the American Way, is a fan, sort of. "Real passion is at such a premium these days," Lear says. "In the land of the sitting and reading dead, Limbaugh's got passion, and thus he's watchable." To columnist Alexander Cockburn (the Nation), Limbaugh's is "a funny act. Humor always helps. But he seems to me the last surviving idiocy of the Reagan-Bush years. It's like those stars that give off light long after they've died. Long after everything Reagan-Bush stood...
Such topicality, of course, is not new for entertainment TV. More than 20 years ago, Norman Lear's All in the Family introduced the notion that situation comedies could provide social commentary while getting laughs. TV movies and drama shows like L.A. Law tackle virtually every headline-making issue that comes down the pike, from date rape to capital punishment. Nor has left-leaning political satire been unknown on network TV: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the late 1960s and Saturday Night Live starting in the mid-'70s took on Establishment targets with irreverent glee...
...face who used to come in and sit in a chair in the corner with a Guinness at his elbow and stare straight ahead for hours at a time and occasionally mumble a few words to himself, and every time he came in I would say to myself, 'King Lear.' " Readers of that passage will not wonder that Mitchell has attended meetings of the James Joyce Society for the past 30 years...
This old man's misanthropy -- the raging of this King Lear of cowboys -- is played out against a backdrop of handsome autumn sunsets. But Eastwood knows that his face, profiled against the gray plains sky, is one of the movies' great monuments. He also knows how to dynamite that monument. The movie takes its time letting you watch Clint turn into Clint. And when he does, it's not thrilling but scary. At the end he threatens to "come back and kill everyone." Behind him, lightning illuminates an American flag and underlines the film's dour message: the world...
There ought to be a shelf of books on Frances Lear's lurid life. Adopted by a vindictive mother and molested repeatedly by a stepfather, she later had three marriages (one to TV producer Norman Lear), countless affairs, numerous addictions and bouts of therapy. Yet she managed to climb the garment-industry ladder and found Lear's magazine. So why does THE SECOND SEDUCTION (Knopf; $19) seem so enervating at a mere 190 sparsely printed pages? For one thing, she never describes the horrors of drugs or the excitement of creating a magazine. For all her vaunted feminism...