Word: mel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...THERE WERE DEBATES about the quality of feature films in this year's Academy Award race. Really now, can anyone but Mel Gibson and Pat Buchanan have thought Braveheart the very best movie of 1995? But on one matter, few of the cognoscenti would argue. The freshest, most beguiling film to win an Oscar last week was an epic you may have never heard of: A Close Shave, Nick Park's stop-motion, comedy-thriller mini-masterpiece about a dog named Gromit and his pet Englishman, Wallace...
...useful to be reminded that America's private life has always been a lot more entertaining than its public life. The instrument of our deliverance from this year's cant and hypocrisy is a deadpan, dead-on movie called Flirting with Disaster. In it an earnest young fellow named Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller), who has been raised by adoptive parents, sets out to find his birth parents. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, since the former are, respectively, a screeching bundle of nerves (Mary Tyler Moore--yes, our Mary, joyfully subverting her institutional self) and a gunnysack...
...faded Southern belle (with, naturally, a glass menagerie) who conceived Mel on a warehouse floor? Could Dad possibly be this truck-driving former Hell's Angel? Mel should be so lucky. For he turns out to be the get of the Schlictings (Alan Alda--as deliriously offcast as Moore--and Lily Tomlin), '60s dropouts who remain dangerously loyal to certain bad habits of their generation...
...ANGELES: "Braveheart" was the big winner at this year's Academy Awards with five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. The movie was Mel Gibson's second behind the camera, after "The Man Without a Face" in 1993. "Like most directors, what I really want to do is act," Gibson joked at the podium. He was not the only actor to be recognized for other talents: Emma Thompson won an Oscar for her adaptation of Jane Austen's novel "Sense and Sensibility." Says TIME's Joelle Attinger: "This is a recognition of the growing cross-fertilization of roles people...
...where he should go, since the editor must also be a storyteller with scissors. Mel Gibson, director and star of Braveheart, praises editor Rosenblum for his "story sense," which allowed them to cut entire chunks without losing the flow. One cut: a long sequence in which the hero catches wind of a British ambush planned to take place at his wife's grave. Gibson has a graphic metaphor for experienced editors: "They're like great surgeons, able to make the right kind of adjustments in places that most of us wouldn't look for. They get into that room with...