Word: screens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Although last night's presidential debate--unlike many other political faceoffs--was not shown on the big screen at the Arco Forum, politically concerned Harvard students found a way to watch the festivities on televisions in dormitory and common rooms across campus...
...liners and pratfalls, the movie is more than satiric fluff. Like Thelma & Louise, which five years ago set audiences to cheering when Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon blasted a trucker's rig to smithereens--or last year's Waiting to Exhale, which had women yelling "Go, girl!" at the screen--The First Wives Club is dipping into a bottomless well of shared female rage. It is rage at the imbalance of power that allows men to use up the best years of a woman's life, then trade her in for an ingenue--and rage at every single element that...
When film surrendered its mass-medium primacy to television in the '50s, it bequeathed to TV most of the female audience. For the next 40 years the small screen would be a comfortable home for women stars, from Lucy to Roseanne. Those actresses who stayed in films found themselves playing caricatures. Davis devolved into a harpy, sharing the horrific What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with Joan Crawford and a rat. Younger actresses took the bimbo route. Both groups were deprived of the intelligence of the '30s, the malefic grandeur of the '40s. Movies were now a man's world...
...excellent, including standards and some interesting sub-standards, like the Gershwin self-parody "Blah Blah Blah" and Leonard Bernstein's pattersong "I Can Cook Too." "Blah Blah Blah" particularly allowed deLima to camp it up, leading the audience in a sing-along while capering to the absurd lyrics. (The screen on which the lyrics were projected was a nice touch, too.) As for the four Sondheim songs, including three in a row at the end, they were not too big a price to pay for the rest -- which is saying quite...
...soon to know whether the movie will have women talking to the screen, as Waiting to Exhale and Thelma & Louise did. But at the very least, it works as an antidote to the zeitgeist of the '80s, when middle-aged tycoons and their acolytes could suddenly drop an inconvenient first wife without social opprobrium. Time was, a price had to be paid for dumping wife No. 1 just as her usefulness was fading, the kids were leaving home, and she was learning what the sun can do to your face and gravity to your thighs. Then, if you decamped with...