Word: raying
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Manhattan. Spider (voiced by Susan Sarandon) here has the melancholy hauteur of a Garbo femme fatale; and the Centipede, obnoxious in the book, is now a Leo Gorcey type (voiced by Richard Dreyfuss), who gets a shot at redemption by fighting a shipful of skeleton pirates straight out of Ray Harryhausen's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad...
...character is named High or Incident. But despite a high-class pedigree--the show is produced by the Dreamworks team of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, with creative guidance from monologist Eric Bogosian--High Incident maintains an embarrassingly CHiPs-like feel as its cast of eight Ray-Ban-wearing patrol-car cops meander about a fictional Los Angeles suburb responding to wacky calls...
...finding is relatively easy; Ray Murdock (James Earl Jones) is a policeman in Chicago. Making peace is another matter; Ray knows how his mother died, was in fact present on that terrible night. Forgiving the white man who seduced her and the half brother whose breech birth killed her is not in his heart. Ray has hidden his long-denied anger beneath a smoothly affable manner. Earl is hiding his more recent astonishment under stony taciturnity. But big-city circumstances force him to take refuge in Ray's home, where his blind, wise, straight-talking aunt (Irma P. Hall) maneuvers...
...interesting but not wholly plausible twist, despite Earl's "white" identity and Southern roots, it is actually he who shakes off his prejudices most easily. Beneath Earl's expressionless facade, he harbors no real racism and sincerely wants to get to know this brother he has never known. Ray's conversion is the true struggle: though outwardly courteous, he holds on to his resentment and his hatred to the very end. An undercurrent of tension therefore remains up to the day of Earl's departure, when Aunt T. shares a secret with them both that dissolves the final barrier between...
...this intended moment of epiphany somehow falls flat, spoiled by Aunt T.'s inappropriate exclamation "You were as white as an angel!" In general, the women in "A Family Thing"--Aunt T., Mrs. Pilcher, Ray's and Earl's mother--are too saintly to be true, while the men are either churls (like Pilcher, Sr.) or burdened by a huge chip on the shoulder. Like balky horses, they must be forced into decent, sensible behavior by their womenfolk. "A Family Thing" would probably have been more convincing had nobility and selfishness been more evenly divided between the two sexes...