Word: nicely
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Vision Quest, Rocky pins Flashdance on the high school wrestling mat. One can find vagrant felicities in these films: a snap to the style of Tuff Turf; the bang-on casting of young actors with unassimilated Irish-American faces in Heaven Help Us; and in Vision Quest some nice quirks of dialogue and a lovely performance by Matthew Modine that makes the whole hokey business the tiniest bit affecting. But even to search for these privileged moments is to lower one's expectations to ankle level. It is like judging a taste-off among six Snickers bars...
Every once in a while, somebody infiltrates the teenpix genre, bends a few rules, applies a little intelligence and comes up with a Risky Business or, last spring, a Sixteen Candles. That funny, good-natured romance offered two teen fantasies for the price of one: a nice girl connects with her prince charming, and a horny dork gets to drive the prom queen to distraction. The Breakfast Club, the new film from the writer-director of Sixteen Candles, John Hughes, is an even odder beguilement. A nine-hour Saturday detention class is called for five balky students: a jock (Emilio...
...argued, in intellectuals. Maybe we could arrange a swap where we could send minorities to the Midwest gays to the South and valley girls to New England in exchange for some preps, intellectuals and an occasional Southern uhra-conservative fanatic. This way we would have a nice random mix of people throughout the country Think of how much we could learn from each other...
...pervasive fog of drugs is the dark side of the Dead Heads' exceptional amiability. There is no thuggery here, as there can be in other rock crowds, no feeling of physical menace. Dead Heads cherish stories of Dead niceness. Kathleen from New Hampshire says that last fall at Augusta, Me., she was stopped at the door when someone sold her a counterfeit Dead ticket. She was sitting outside the hall, crying, when a stranger came up and gave her a real ticket, and a rose. But drug burnout is a problem among these nice people. Keep your ears open just...
Elmore Leonard gives this piece of business a nice wrinkle by delaying the punch line for eleven pages. Don't ask how; the ploy works like the rim shot of a drummer perking up a lounge comic's routine. Leonard may not be the tightest plotter on the popular thriller circuit, but he is the writer who pays closest attention to getting the tacky details right. Bribing a night clerk with a greasy cheese-steak sub is something that could happen only in the Philadelphia-South Jersey axis of ethnic indigestibles...