Word: richards
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), hero of David Lynch's The Straight Story, brings out the best in people--by talking or listening to them or just by the example of his tortoise-like quest. He is driving his John Deere lawnmower 350 miles to see his estranged brother. Alvin turns out to be your basic Lynch hero: a Kyle Maclachlan type, as average as apple pie, who follows his obsessions to heaven or hell. The supporting cast is normal too--and thus vastly weird, because Lynch presents them, as he did the sickos of Blue Velvet, without comment or condescension...
...Richard Corliss...
...refine Will after the show's pilot. ("No gay man had hair like Will's, really long in the back," jokes Seomin. "He looked like Jerry Seinfeld.") Certainly much of the biting banter and in-jokes of W&G--"I haven't seen a kiss that uncomfortable since Richard Gere and Jodie Foster in Sommersby"--would be unimaginable in the era of Three's Company's fairy jokes. Some shows even cultivate what you might call a gay sensibility. HBO's heterosexual (and how) sitcom Sex and the City regularly broaches sexual gray areas, taking the perspective, less broadly embraced...
...those familiar with director David Lynch's work (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Lost Highway), this storyline, which is based on the actual journey made by 73-year-old Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), seems right up Lynch's alley---quirky and Midwestern, with a lawnmower thrown in for good measure. Interestingly enough, Lynch was initially opposed to directing The Straight Story. But after reading the screenplay written by Mary Sweeney and John Roach, Lynch was won over: "[I] wasn't interested in it. I never thought I would make this story, but the screenplay turned me around. I loved...
...most amazing is that he can make these looks and breaths seem as powerful in the 500 seat mainstage theater as they did in the infinitely smaller Ex. In an auditorium that was large enough to enclose a battle between two armies in last year's production of Richard III, Kellerman can make the distance between two characters--often no more than a few feet, sometimes as small as a few inches--seem like the most important space in the world. And he can hold an audience breathless waiting not for a shout but for a whimper...