Word: pattered
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Trip Hawkins, founder and chairman of 3DO, was one of the first to see that Hollywood and the video-game industry were headed toward a happy collision. With his salesman patter and show-biz smile, he has for years been telling anyone who would listen that video arcades were more popular than movie houses -- and he would rattle off the numbers to prove it. As chairman of Electronic Arts, a leading maker of video games (and the first to treat its programmers like rock stars), he also railed against the electronics industry for failing to agree on a single video...
...White took aim yet again, Black crossed the room and wrapped her right arm around White. "I figured if she could feel my body, maybe she wouldn't kill me," Black recalls. Tightening the hug, Black placed her left hand over the gun and began a soothing patter. "You're in pain. I understand, and we can work it out." After five, maybe 10 minutes, White told Black she would give her the gun. Only after police handcuffed White did Black break down in sobs. "I don't know why the hell I did what I did," Black says...
Also good are Doug Miller as the Duke and Yoseph Choi as the Grand Inquisitor. Miller has one of the strangest accents in a show full of pseudo-Brits but he prances about the stage in the best tradition of the "little man who sings the patter song," as Anna Russell put it. If he is less strong in the second act, his introductory song, "The Duke of Plaza-Toro," in the first is one of the best moments of the show. Blessedly, he understands the importance of enunciation. Choi plays the Inquisitor as a little more of a lech...
Since TV's birth, the funny weatherman has been the medium's primal infotainment guy, a stand-up comic who uses lively banter and cute graphics to sell a lot of dull data about isobars. Phil Connors (Murray) is an ace at his job; he has the patter down pat. But he's been working under his own high- pressure system too long. Off camera, to his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell), and his cameraman, Larry (Chris Elliott), Phil is a captious creep. They would be thrilled to hear that he has been lost in space...
HUMONGOUS GENERALIZATION OF the week: Hollywood movies are masculine; foreign and independent films are feminine. Most Hollywood efforts -- the action movies, comedies, domestic thrillers -- come at you like a teenage boy in heat, working hard to dazzle with energy and patter when they are not being brutal and obscene. What you often end up sitting through is two hours of guys gunning their engines. John Sayles' film Passion Fish has a line about this tendency. When the heroine is told that a suitor might take her for a ride in his refurbished boat, she notes wryly, "Men like that...