Word: patters
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...clever, derivative comedy (think The Truman Show with lower ratings) about a wandering shaman who stumbles into fame on a home shopping network. But the real star is Jeff Goldblum as the network's frazzled manager. With his lupine smile and fake-intimate voice, he pushes a line of patter that is just a bit too slick to pass for charm. And when his life starts crumbling, you can almost smell his comic flop sweat through the screen. Tom Schulman's script is smart about the media's ability to create celebrities--and the viewer's need to embrace them...
...downtown theater scene. But this is a wig of a different color. John Cameron Mitchell, who wrote the show and does a smashing turn (accompanied by a grungy back-up band) as the fictional Hedwig, avoids high camp, low sex jokes and Judy Garland impressions. True, Hedwig's stage patter has its share of double entendres ("I do love a warm hand on my entrance"), but the literate script is also a poignant meditation on loneliness, gender confusion and the Platonic notion that sex is the effort to reconnect two halves of one ideal being. All of this is embellished...
...Daimler-Benz It's a match made in Detroit heaven: Luxury European auto meets mass-market American car. They marry, and await the pitter-patter of $131 billion in annual worldwide sales. That's the love story Wall Street would like to write for Daimler Benz and Chrysler, who went public with their wooing Wednesday. Why? Because the dowry would be huge: Sources close to the deal say Daimler would buy their bride for $35 billion, a full $8 billion above Chrysler's market value. Such a wedding would make for the largest industrial merger in history...
...does the romance of shared routes, ticketing and frequent flyer miles lead to the pitter-patter of lower fares? Well, not exactly: "The alliances may simplify travel, but reducing competition always carries the risk of raising prices," says Kadlec. The market, after all, has a heart of stone...
There's little moral rooting interest here; the fun comes from expert actors spitting out the lurid rhythms of punk patter. You want affability fragging into menace? Tarantino can write it for you. Jackson and Fonda, especially, can deliver it with a swell sting...