Word: lemmons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon are awfully good at this sort of thing. You might say they've been practicing since they were (relatively speaking) kids. By this time they instinctively know how to bring out the comic best in each other -- Matthau's bullying misanthropy, Lemmon's melancholic good cheer. It follows that they invest Grumpy Old Men, in which they play querulous neighbors, with an appeal that is nostalgic and, if you are a devotee of well- practiced shtick, technically seamless...
Grumpy Old Men avoids both queasiness and boredom by throwing only sharp, sidelong glances at old-age issues like straitened circumstances and the death of friends. And the fact that Matthau and Lemmon are playing men of their own ages (73 and 68), which Harris and Duvall (61 and 63) are not, adds authenticity and an element of gallantry to the movie. It also suggests a solution to the problem of old age: if you're healthy, keep working...
...Life in the Theatre remains, as it was on stage, a two-hander between a veteran actor (Lemmon) who never quite made it and a protege (Matthew Broderick) whose star is beginning to rise. Mamet has opened up the work shrewdly, placing the two men among backstage colleagues, on street corners, in neighborhood bars and coffee shops, making their encounters more naturalistic and believable. Yet he and director Gregory Mosher have retained enough of the stylized original to bring off satiric fragments of pseudo-plays -- costume epics and drawing-room comedies that are the antithesis of Mamet's blowtorch aesthetic...
...competitive now. The older man's brushes with self-destruction and madness are rooted in his loss of ease during the only part of the day that matters to him, the moments when the lights come on. Whether by design or happenstance, he is all the more touching because Lemmon's character comes across as vastly more talented than Broderick's. Only unconquerable age can lower...
...almost drown out the futuristic satire. Fearless transforms a disaster story into a meditation on mortality. BOOKS The J.F.K. presidency gets a cool, fascinating analysis by Richard Reeves. MUSIC Jimmy Webb soars into the '90s with a lush and lyrical album. TELEVISION An adapted David Mamet play shows Jack Lemmon at his best...