Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Give us a break. Of course they will. But only after a few plot twists that, unfortunately, are not quite as humorous as they are contrived. ("Plot" in Pudding shows is just a euphemism for "getting from one musical number to the next," just as "dialogue" is just the words that fill in the spaces between the puns...
Demi Moore had the best role of 1990, if you multiply intensity of character by box-office impact. As the grieving widow in Ghost, Moore grounded the preposterous plot -- she gets a last chance to make love with her lost love -- and gave it resonance. She has shone in romantic comedy (about last night . . .) and Brat Pack frippery (St. Elmo's Fire). She always seems wired; nerves on edge, talent on display...
Much of the plot revisits territory from the stage hit Other People's Money, the movie Wall Street and a shelf of recent nonfiction, not to mention such Eisenhower-era cautionary tales as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Katz's prose is competent, his dialogue serviceable and his cast of characters large and mostly faceless (although its obsessives stand out: a shopworn survivor of the executive-suite wars; a by-hook-or-by-crook booker of talk-show interviewees; and a tough, moralistic accountant...
...Family Secrets gives no indication that Prince has any talent as a writer or director. Here is the plot in a nutshell: Diane Casper (Daniela Raz), a 27-year-old photojournalist, visits her grandmother Theresa Stanski (Frances Maxime). While there, she finds rolls of old film in the attic, develops them and learns that years earlier her mother, Catherine Casper (Sheila McDonald), lied to Diane about her father...
...back memories." She then starts an interminable monologue about escaping from Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, or coming to America, or her late husband Joe. These speeches present a detailed and authentic-sounding portrait of Eastern European immigrants, but so what? The details have nothing to do with the plot and, more important, confine the action to the past, making for a most unsatisfactory theater-going experience...