Word: shiftlessly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From the movie's opening scenes in which Hopper practices piano in a distinctly American living room, the film sets itself up as a voice of patriotism and loyalty. Although Hopper defies his crotchety piano teacher by playing jazz instead of classics and hangs out with the shiftless and disreputable Nicky, the director emphasizes Hooper's innate goodness. He doesn't put on airs to woo the snooty upper class preps who ridicule him at the bowling alley and even when he discovers that Caddie is an upper class "Gatsby girl," he takes pride in his humble, yet honorable, origins...
This is a criticism one extends to Meryl Streep in the title role. She is an actress of calculated effects, which work well when she is playing self-consciously intelligent women. But interpreting a character who abandoned three children, shares a house with a rather shiftless boyfriend and a lesbian (Kurt Russell and Cher, both of whom are easier and more naturalistic performers) and shows her contempt for Authority by flashing a bare breast at its representative, she seems at once forced and pulled back...
Jill Rosen (Rosanna Arquette) is bright, Jewish and just pretty enough to be told she has that Audrey Hepburn quality. "Sheik" Capadilupo (Vincent Spano) is Italian and shiftless, with Vaselined hair and a wardrobe that Giorgio Armani might have designed for Jimmy ("the Weasel") Fratianno. She loves rock 'n' roll, he loves Sinatra. She's going to Sarah Lawrence, he's going nowhere. They have nothing in common but an over whelming love for her. But something in Jill thrills to the troubles Sheik gets himself into and to the threat he poses to her middle...
...while onlookers cheered. That one was preceded by yet another at the University of Pennsylvania; there a young woman has charged that she was gang-raped by five to eight fraternity brothers during a party. Class distinctions need not apply. If one is tempted to construct a hypothesis around shiftless young Irishmen in a poor city neighborhood or the unemployed Portuguese in a depressed fishing port, sociology is obliterated by the party boys from the U. of P., no different in kind or action, just privilege. All subhumans are created equal...
...Left behind is the shell-streets still hugged by low buildings, as in some abandoned Midwestern downtown. Yet, even today, the name Hollywood retains its mystical appeal. In a sense the name and the place diverged long ago-the name symbolic of faded glamour; the place filled with the shiftless, the criminal and the crazy...