Word: melina
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Anne Meara manages to chew gum and act at the same time as a Gerald Ford figure; her role is amusing, but it fits poorly into the narrative. Playing Kissinger with a Greek accent, Melina Mercouri advises Jackson from abroad, using a portable phone to check on the abbess' progress. It is funny once or twice, but not as a running gag. Still, there are few problems with the acting save the occasional air of embarrassment from the nuns who deliver the poorest lines...
...shades imperceptibly into sanctity or into sanctimony as her plotting requires. Sandy Dennis has some moments of dimwit charm as a John Dean-like scapegoat who has none of Dean's shrewdness, or anybody else's either. But a running gag in which a globetrotting diplomatic nun (Melina Mercouri) periodically uses her briefcase radio-phone to coach Jackson in Kissingeresque Realpolitik falls rather flat. And the Gerald Ford figure is a football-playing nun (Anne Meara) who is always-guess what?-falling and bumping into things. That joke has long since been exhausted in TV sketches...
...these days, Actress Melino Mercouri has been trying her luck in a classic role-as Euripides' Medea, who slays her sons rather than surrender them to her philandering husband. "When she kills, she does so not for vengeance, but so that her sons will not be slaves," asserts Melina, 50. "There is nothing more to say, today or tomorrow, about a woman who believes in human and women's rights...
That gremlin with the Groucho stash is really Sandy Dennis, disguised as a payoff man in the movie The Abbess. Based on Novelist Muriel Spark's spoof of Watergate, The Abbess of Crewe, the film features Dennis, Melina Mercouri and Geraldine Page as nuns engaging in some unholy intrigue. Says Sandy: "I play a not very bright sister who talks loudly and does what my mother used to call 'all the grunt work' " -including the delivery of hush money to a men's room in Philadelphia. At that point, justice triumphs, and Sandy is nabbed...
January throws herself onto Colt's impotent lap, precipitating a whole series of romantic climaxes and their dramatic antitheses. There are other funny goings-on: a putative sapphic interlude between Alexis Smith and Melina Mercouri, which sends off as many sparks as a doused campfire; an astronaut's confession that his wife and he "didn't really get along before I flew to the moon"; Brenda Vaccaro's struggle as a magazine editor who cannot write, bragging that "we have a whole staff of underpaid shmucks to take care of that...