Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...intensity and hints of Depp's other main line, which consists of making something quite hypnotic out of a passivity enlivened by nothing more than watchful alertness. He used this strand in his oddly matched pair of accountants, one of whom is drawn against his will into an assassination plot in Badham's Nick of Time, while the other is bedeviled by various personifications of frontier mythology in Jim Jarmusch's shaggy, satirical western, Dead...
...woman's preaching is like a dog walking on its hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." In fact, most of Necessary Madness is done very well indeed, at least within the restrictions of its genre. Crowell keeps her plot moving briskly along, and her narrator gets off some good lines. Looking back on her teenage fling with punk fashions, she notes, "I graduated second in my high school class, which meant that I had the distinction of being the school's first purple-haired salutatorian...
...Ruth spends the duration of the play trying to slow her down. The triviality of this detail is magnified enormously as it is repeated, endlessly. Also distracting is the number of times Charles visits the liquor cabinet and meticulously makes dry martinis--stirred, not shaken. The pace of the plot is not quick enough to keep from being bogged down by these contrivances...
Some impatience with the play perhaps results from seeing this scenario one too many times. Popular movies (Ghost, Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters) with the same treatment of otherworldly experiences have numbed us to the once-ingenious plot. It's particularly ironic that his plays should seem hackneyed, since Coward's ideas broke into the conservatism of the 1940's with his sexual innuendo and fresh comedic touch. Damn that Hollywood...
...before the Rushmore carvings were completed in 1941. Eastwood, directing himself as a cat burglar on his eighth or ninth life, is 66, as is Gene Hackman, who plays a sexually reckless U.S. President. E.G. Marshall, in the role of the President's adviser, is 86 and counting. The plot is a doomsday version of Bill Clinton's Paula Jones problem, but the theme is impending mortality--settling scores before time...