Word: pfeiffer
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...widow know? As the camera tiptoes closer, Angela pours out her valentine-on-velvet heart. Tony this, Frank that, life sure does stink. And at the precise intersection of streetwise agony and Method acting -- the very moment at which an actress is expected to secure her Oscar nomination -- Michelle Pfeiffer crosses her eyes...
Demme is tops at luring these confidences, these comic grace notes, out of his performers. And Pfeiffer knows how to dish them out with the generosity of an haut-monde hostess casting intimate glances at strangers. Both artists have made funky music before -- easy on the ears, with reverberations that jangle provocatively in a moviegoer's memory. But the violent mood swings Demme programmed into films like Melvin and Howard and Something Wild often kept viewers at a bemused remove. And once or twice Pfeiffer has been stuck in films she could ornament but not inform. This time, though, these...
When the script deftly maneuvers Angela, Mike, Tony and Connie into the most expensively hideous suite in a Miami Beach hotel, Demme finds a satisfying comic payoff for the first time in his career. And in Pfeiffer -- a California blond in black wig and cramped Queens patois -- he has secured the emotional anchor to his vertiginous sight gags...
...have perhaps heard that Pfeiffer is beyond gorgeous: serene blue eyes, jawline by Garbo, perfect teeth unstained by the occasional Marlboro. The bearer is more modest in appraisal. "Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, they're beautiful," Pfeiffer says. "I think I look like a duck. The way my mouth curls up and my nose tilts, I should have played Howard the Duck." Sure, but Howard couldn't work his mouth so that when fashioned into a smile, it has the innocence of a shy Cinderella's, and when upended, it curdles into the sulk of a party animal no man should...
...Music is puckish too, but in a different way. An abandoned turn-of-the-century beaux arts vaudeville hall, it has been transformed into a performance space (and folly) in which Avant- Garde Director Peter Brook could present his 9 1/2-hour epic, The Mahabharata. The firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates has implanted modern plumbing and electrical systems but otherwise has maintained the look of desuetude: chipped plaster and peeling paint, exposed beams and brickwork. The Piranesianism is a bit coy, maybe, but more affecting than much standard spic- and-span preservation...