Word: one
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...like most soap operas, this one is gearing up for another emotional climax. It's a comeback on Broadway, where Liza opens this week in a month-long concert engagement at the Palace Theater, where Garland herself once staged a famous comeback. Called Minnelli on Minnelli, Liza's show is a tribute to the movies of her father Vincente, director of such classic Hollywood musicals as Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris and Gigi. In it she reminisces a bit, shows pictures from the family album, sings numbers identified with her mother that she would never touch...
...showered her with costumes from his lushly designed movies and would improvise bedtime stories from ideas that she threw out. "I fought my whole life to say I have this ordinary background, because I wanted to fit in," she says. "But it was an extraordinary background." Describe it in one phrase? "Imaginative opulence," she answers...
...parse that one too closely. But let's not completely rule out the sincerity either. "The last thing my father said to me before he died was, 'You haven't scratched the surface yet,'" she recalls. "So hopefully I'm digging a little bit deeper now. With a little more wisdom, knowledge, grace." If it took Dad to make Liza grow up, who are we to argue...
...style that looked spare in one movie can feel bloated in the next. That's the case with The Green Mile, reverently taken from King's serialized novel. It's 1935, and we're on a Southern prison's death row, where the only recreation is watching a mouse commandeer the corridor. Enter a new inmate, John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan), a giant black man with a gift of preternatural empathy; he can literally suck the pain out of people. Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks), the chief guard of E Block, is in awe of this white magic. He benefits from...
...sharp acting, led by Hanks' pained restraint. The two villains are vigorously portrayed: a sadistic, craven guard (Doug Hutchison) and a strutting, rabid inmate (played with a daringly lunatic, dark-star quality by Sam Rockwell), whose crimes are even worse than we feared. At the core, though, one finds a slacky, sappy film. The human mystery that breathed so easily in Shawshank is often forced here. Grandstanding reaction shots of teary guards cue us to John Coffey's miraculous power as surely as the big man's initials hint at his majesty...