Word: mud
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...World War III. Director Ivan Reitman is a canny merchant. He knows that the easy laughs are the surest, that teen-agers love to watch goofballs shape up without losing their shambling style, and that it doesn't hurt business to insert a sorority shower scene or nude mud-wrestling match every half-hour or so. Stripes will keep potential felons off the streets for two hours. Few people seem to be asking, these days, that movies do more...
While gold has not been used to settle accounts between central banks for a decade, it still remains the barometer of world tension. From mud and straw shanties in India to plush villas in France, nervous people stash away Krugerrand coins or gold jewelry at the first sign of any political or economic unrest. Last week, after the Israel's attacked Iraq's nuclear reactor, the price of gold immediately shot...
Then difficulties begin in earnest. Although their children slip easily into the new, primitive surroundings, the parents find it hard to adjust to the "habitation of mud houses." Food is scarce, sanitation minimal, and disease threatens with every drink from the nearby river. They fear betrayal. July can apparently keep the members of his extended family quiet, but perhaps "he could not prevent other people, living scattered round about, who knew the look of every thornbush, from discovering there were thornbushes that overgrew a white man's car, and passing on that information to any black army patrol...
...morning and shopping for supplies; they wonder if this behavior is not reproachful, a way of setting them apart from the life of the village. The white wife cannot join the women in their daily routines, and her husband is powerless, "an architect lying on a bed in a mud hut, a man without a vehicle...
Still, there is Pryor. Whether he is trying to keep up his nerve while holding up a television store, getting the Ku Klux Klan to help push the bus out of the mud, or merely riding a horse for the first time, he has an indestructible charm. Another comedian might grow desperate in such unpromising circumstances. Not Pryor. The easy subtlety of his glances and gestures, never too big, always wonderfully readable, almost convinces one that something worthwhile is happening here-or is about to. One remains alert to his possibilities. And wishes that the people who make his pictures...