Word: mama
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...year's best actor, but the academy did not even nominate him. His twisted turn as Orin Scrivello, D.D.S. (Drop Dead Sadist), in the 1986 Little Shop of Horrors should have won him a supporting-actor nod. After all, he was playing a deranged Elvis impersonator who loves his mama, tortures his girlfriend and dies of a nitrous oxide overdose. It was as if Martin were living out a line from the Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid trailer: "He'll do anything in the quest for the elusive Academy Award!" Still, nada...
...singing: up, down, soft, sweet. And diction was very important." You can hear the fruit of Cissy's lessons even in a dance tune like How Will I Know. In the refrain "If he loves me,/ If he loves me not," Whitney really punches that final t. No wonder: Mama was singing backup...
...struggle of one lazy, overweight recruit named Pyle. His struggle to shed his dependency on jelly doughtnuts is almost comical, with Kubrick showing Pyle absurdly running at the end of the platoon with his pants at his ankles, sucking his thumb. The transformation of Pyle from chubby mama's boy to bloodthirsty marine is an incredulous feat, serving to demonstrate how a hellish eight-week boot camp stay can turn even the meekest of men into "jolly green giants with rifles...
...major awards, including a MacArthur "genius grant." He has a town house in Greenwich Village. But before the adulation and creature comforts came decades of very hard scrambling. He was born near Pittsburgh in the depths of the Depression, and his parents separated when he was a small boy. Mama was too busy managing hotel dining rooms to spend much time with her son. Still, he recalls, "I don't remember ever being lonely -- I had health, privacy, and a mother I was wild about." Early on he recognized the "beautiful curse" of solitude, "the one without which I doubt...
...ambition, low energy, he says now of this period. Low results too; he kept his guitars tuned, but the none-too-healthy pop-music industry, then as now, was preoccupied with selling rock 'n' roll to teenagers. Listeners, when he had listeners, cheered his Drop Down Mama and Rainy Day Man and laughed at his New Hampshire jokes. But in one of the gutsy blues yowls that he had begun to sing in his twangy weathered baritone, he complained about feeling "like some old engine, lost my driving wheel . . ." And that described his stalled career...