Word: puzzlements
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wonder whether the man was a genius (his native genius hidden till the crucial moment) or a nonentity who blundered into momentary success, who arrived at immortality by accident. Ronald Reagan is a leader of totally different temperament and tailoring, but one sometimes hears the same puzzlement over his luck and political successes. In this comparison of qualifications, acting in Hollywood is the moral equivalent of selling cordwood in St. Louis or clerking in Galena, Ill., as Grant did before...
...flight has been "Tom Tuttle from Tacoma" (John Candy), who reads books about maximizing his potential capital-wise and is the most egregious go-getter since Babbitt. His next is Beth Wexler (Rita Wilson), who rejects a night and a day of advances, to Lawrence's immense puzzlement ("I do think I've put in the hours, don't you?"). The rest of this ship of idealists bellows away the time with endless choruses of '60s sing-along favorites like Puff the Magic Dragon...
Sawing the ends off his long sticks, fashioning a collage of tape and talcum, Gretzky remains after the others to tinker and think. "If anyone wants Neil Diamond tickets," someone advises the room with a shout, "call Dorothy." Gretzky looks up in puzzlement. "Who's Neil Diamond...
...turns out to be a great subject for comedy too. See Tom try to pay for a + restaurant meal with stage money. See his puzzlement when he leaps behind the wheel of a car and it refuses to take off. ("This is real life," practical Cecilia murmurs. "They don't start without a key.") See him plant a perfect movie kiss on her lips and then frown suddenly: "Where's the fade-out? . . . You make love without fade-outs?" But if transfiguration delights those blessed by it, it confounds those it fails to touch. One of the reasons Cecilia loves...
Beverly Hills Cop is a comedy of mutual dismay, in which Axel's culture shock over the way his West Coast colleagues gumshoe through Lotusland is matched by their outraged puzzlement over how to handle a streetwise hipster for whom anarchy is both a way of life and an investigative technique. Were Eddie Murphy absent from this movie one might decry its ambling and the failure of writer and director to develop out of a fertile premise either a well-twisted mystery or some truly wild comic turns. But Murphy is very much present, and it could be argued...