Word: painful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Approach #6. The Cool-o-Matic Approach. This is it. Sashay your way through Freshman Week without pain or loss of all-important style points. If you want to enjoy your week, do it this way. Arrive a little bit late, at the risk of being stuck with the living room or the misfit in your rooming group. Yeah, that's right, the 400-pound sumo wrestler from East Schneck who listens to opera real loud, and picks his nose...
...time he is grown and has children of his own, a swirl of love and rage occludes his perception of them. Literature offers a useful look, but most often it is a look at that minority of tormented adolescents whose members grow up to write novels about the pain of puberty, not the joy. Films of the traditional sort did not risk truthtelling, largely because of the hoodoo of sex. What they gave us was Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland sipping one soda through two straws. The suggestion that Judy wore a bra, and that Mickey might have wanted...
...pain. From the very first shot--of Nick Nolte bleeding through his upturned nose into his pillow--we see the physical agony of these walking receptacles of pus and scars and shattered joints, pumped full of speed and xylocane. Nolte, step by agonizing step, gropes for his painkillers, washes them down with warm beer, and settles into his tub to get high. Fortified, he staggers through the Pro Football Day--wild parties, reckless hunting, chasing women. Does the pleasure make up for the pain? This is North Dallas Forty's existensial question. Phil Elliot, Nolte's latest in a series...
...until his "big" scene at the end of the movie, when he emotes and rocks and gesticulates like a marionette and babbles in an elaborately whiny voice. Mostly, though, he's pretty good--funny, spirited, with a tongue-in-cheek existensial awareness made coarsely funny beside his physical pain...
...novel of the same name, is fairly true to the book. Like gent's novel, the movie captures the urban cowboy humor of the locker rooms, it delights in the sadistic pedantry of the coaches who see football as a business and players as equipment, and it squirms with pain from beginning to end. For caricatures, the supporting characters are remarkable--they put a lot into their limited parts. G.D. Spradin as Coach Johnson has a fear-inspiring glimmer in his eye and a loud piercing voice; he's an army sergeant who's made it in the big leagues...