Word: phil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...magic of this LP is that even this melodramatic treatment works in the context of the album's Christmas spirit and sense of current pop history. Just as Perry Como's Christmas LPs please our parents, and Phil Spector and Motown Christmas records serve the baby boomers, A Very Special Christmas is meant for us, capturing the true pop sounds and commercial spirit of a today--for a good cause...
...play's other actors try for less serious performances. Mike Gaw and Robert P. Chapski wryly exaggerate their cameos as Portia's unsuccessful suitors. Jeff Hobson is a nicely lecherous Lancelot Gobbo. Phil Fry squeezes the maximum comedic possibilities from his roles as servant Stephano and the blind Old Gobbo...
Written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson...
...Director Phil Alden Robinson, whose previous credits include the screenplay for All Of Me, weaves the story of Carver in a relentlessly sentimental sweetness fest that made me long for the hard-bitten realism of Bambi, or at least Goldilocks and the Three Bears...
...Phil Alden Robinson, the writer-director of In the Mood, does not seek even the modest parable. He is all amiability recounting the true tale of "Sonny" Wisecarver, the 1940s California teen who twice eloped with older women and became a media sensation. Patrick Dempsey, Talia Balsam and Beverly D'Angelo agreeably impart the message that adolescent sexual energy can cheerily compensate for lack of sexual sophistication. But one cannot help feeling that there is a wicked craziness in their odd couplings that escaped a directorial eye looking merely for goofiness...