Word: offbeat
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...Brando is, well, Brando. The point of departure for The Freshman is a newspaper article Bergman came across, describing the arrest of a under-world figure for illegally smuggling endangered animals into the United States. Brando is flawless in his portrayal of the omniscient honor-bound mafia figure, just offbeat enough to make very believable the idea of a man involved in importing endangered species. Unfortunately, this ridiculous plot should not be the heart of the film. Like all of Bergman's scripts, The Freshman is about a man trapped in circumstances beyond his control, a role filled here...
Around the block is Temptations, which opened last year on the site of the old Haagen-Dazs. Temptations has more offbeat flavors than Licks does, but its mall decor is slightly unsettling. Temptations also weighs your yogurt portion, lest they give you that extra tenth of an ounce. Personally, we feel violated when someone weighs our yogurt...
...read, not very user friendly, and cluttered. Readers and advertisers were complaining." Jarvis and E.W.'s design director, Michael Grossman, willingly carried out the format revisions. But a more subtle problem was Jarvis' choice of covers, like the one on the very first issue (Feb. 16), which featured the offbeat country singer K.D. Lang. Many media watchers felt that to succeed as a mass magazine, E.W. had to appeal to a broader audience, one perhaps more attracted by covers about Madonna and Dick Tracy...
...counted a success -- and not just d'estime. The show has proved that original, challenging and idiosyncratic fare can be done for TV, even within rigid network confines, and that people will tune in. Twin Peaks is, in fact, the culmination of a surprisingly fruitful season for offbeat, formula-breaking shows. ABC's Elvis, though a failure in the ratings, deconstructed the rock king's life into fresh, evocative snippets of biodrama. Fox's The Simpsons put an off-kilter, animated spin on TV's portrayal of the family, while Fox's The Outsiders, at least in its early episodes...
...Talk, NPR's offbeat call-in show, gets as much mileage out of the jokes as the information. Boston's Tappet brothers -- actually two M.I.T. grads named Ray and Tom Magliozzi, who own an auto-repair shop and drive U.S. models -- have turned America's love-hate relationship with the automobile into a stand-up routine. "Do you know why they call the Volvo the poor man's Mercedes?" Ray once asked a perplexed caller. "Because the repair bills will keep you too poor to buy a Mercedes...