Word: levinson
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...Barry Levinson wants to talk about the new script...
...BOTTOM LINE: Hollywood heavyweight Barry Levinson tries a cop show. It's good, but it's still a cop show...
...besieged Metropolis of network television, mild-mannered shows are too often expected to be Superman. Barry Levinson, the acclaimed director of the films Diner and Rain Man, was commissioned by NBC some time ago to develop a TV series based on David Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, an account of real-life Baltimore homicide detectives. With a Hollywood heavyweight taking a crack at one of TV's most durable genres, the project seemed like a good...
...strong cast -- including Yaphet Kotto, Ned Beatty and Richard Belzer -- helps make the group portrait work, and Levinson (who directed the first episode) shows off his Diner talent for small talk tinged with satire. ("Dry wall," says one detective, musing about leaving police work for another job. "You put up dry wall, and you got a sense of accomplishment.") Though the hand-held camera and jump cuts seem like affectations, the show hums along smoothly and is refreshingly light on violence. Detectives who grill suspects in Homicide do it with verbal cunning, not strong-arm bullying. (Belzer...
Based on a moldering script by director Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin, Toys is informed by a sensibility still more antique: 1960s peacenik. It posits a conflict for control of a family toy company between a near holy fool (Robin Williams) and his uncle, a retired Army general (Michael Gambon) who wants to convert the plant to military-weapons production. Both are predictable types. Their employees are so sweetly innocent one longs for Hoffa's Teamsters to come in and give them mean lessons. But everyone's main function is to trigger special effects and lend scale to production designer...