Word: rocke
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...precisely why it cannot be easily legislated. Make romance a thing for lawyers, and callousness and shame turn into crime and punishment. Yet today we have girls suing their dates for standing them up, and star-crossed ex-lovers -- the former partners of William Hurt, Mike Tyson and Rock Hudson, to name but three -- counting the emotional cost in millions. Litigation means never having to say you're sorry...
Rarely have the denouncers of censorship been so eager to start practicing it. When a sense of moral disorientation overcomes a society, people from the least expected quarters begin to ask, "Is nothing sacred?" Feminists join reactionaries to denounce pornography as demeaning to women. Rock musician Frank Zappa declares that when Tipper Gore, the wife of Senator Albert Gore from Tennessee, asked music companies to label sexually explicit material, she launched an illegal "conspiracy to extort." A Penthouse editorialist says that housewife Terry Rakolta, who asked sponsors to withdraw support from a sitcom called Married . . . With Children, is "yelling fire...
...approved by citizens in all their dealings with one another. As Zappa says, "Masturbation is not illegal. If it is not illegal to do it, why should it be illegal to sing about it?" He thinks this proves that Gore, who is not trying to make raunch in rock illegal, cannot even ask distributors to label it. Anything goes, as long as it's legal. The odd consequence of this argument would be a drastic narrowing of the freedom of speech. One could not call into question anything that was not against the law -- including, for instance, racist speech...
...censoriousness (another word for censure). Most civilizations have expressed their moral values by mobilization of social opprobrium. That, rather than specific legislation, is what changed the treatment of minorities in films and TV over recent years. One can now draw opprobrious attention by gay bashing, as the Beastie Boys rock group found when their distributor told them to cut out remarks about "fags" for business reasons. Or by anti-Semitism, as the just disbanded rap group Public Enemy has discovered...
Like Harry and Sally, the movie is hardworking, spot on; it winepresses its conversation into epigrams. No surprise here. Reiner found wayward comedy in such genres as the rock documentary (This Is Spinal Tap) and the historical romance (The Princess Bride). Crystal, the improv master who is Reiner's closest friend -- "We finish each other's sentences," Crystal says, "and he finishes my lunch" -- meets the challenge of making a compulsive Lothario not just likable but impishly seductive. And Ephron, a helpful Heloise of emotional heartburn, perks the script with clever answers to modern problems. How long should...