Word: screens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...because kids who stepped before the camera at an early age learned that the most important weapon in their arsenal was their gamine appeal. From the start they were tutored in the art of beguilement, the seductive talent of getting looked at. (These kids wouldn't be on screen if someone hadn't noticed them and said, "You oughta be in pictures.") They have been watched, and aware they're being watched, since grade school. That's a lesson that's hard to unlearn...
...child stars, not child actors. To oversimplify wildly, a star is someone whose personality monopolizes the screen; an actor is someone who slips into another personality. The star says, "Look at me." The actor says, "Look at the me I'm playing." Of course, nobody in movies is all star or all actor. Every star is playing a role, and every actor reveals bits of himself or herself. But so many child stars, including some of the brilliant ones - Mickey Rooney, Margaret O'Brien, Billy Gray, Patty Duke, Tatum O'Neal - either found it difficult to sustain their appeal...
...prizes for The Queen and The Last King of Scotland and the Broadway play Frost Nixon, so you might expect something more than the puffy costume drama you get. Justin Chadwick, the director, is from TV, and apparently thinks that extreme closeups are as telling on the big screen as the small. No question that Portman's and Johansson's faces merit microscopic attention, but the film has a cramped feeling that turns every urgent, conspiratorial confidence into an italicized shout. That's a shame, because the movie has some excellent supporting skullduggery by Mark Rylance as the Boleyn girls...
...huge screen on the Caesars Palace stage reveals a Nevada billboard bearing a poster of Bette Midler. She's posed in a cute blue dress with a short skirt that shows off her indestructibly fabulous gams; her smile is so electric it could light every casino on the Strip. A donkey wanders past, seemingly unimpressed, as, in the distance, a storm gathers strength. It morphs into a tornado, sending croupiers and chorines whizzing across the skyscape like Miss Gulch over Kansas. The door to an airborne Port-A-Potty swings open and an Elvis impersonator falls out. Now the video...
...publisher's view was that "this author is beyond psychiatric help." As if to prove that a new moral compass was at work in inner space, Ballard's book attracted little controversy until 23 years later, when the shock-horror director David Cronenberg brought Crash to the big screen. The French, Ballard notes, "accepted without qualms the yoking together of sex, death and the motor car. Anyone who drives in France is steering into the pages of Crash." But in England, the movie's distribution was delayed for a year by a wave of media-led outrage. "What's going...