Word: show-biz
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...putting a teen- idol spin on a black urban beat. Eight years and 60 million albums, singles and videotapes later, the group -- Donnie Wahlberg, Jordan Knight, Jonathan Knight, Danny Wood and Joe McIntyre -- are no longer new and no longer kids. Now in their mid-20s, they have, in show-biz terms at least, reached that other awkward age, groping for a way to reach an adult audience without alienating the screaming teenyboppers who made them rich and famous. So what's an old New Kid to do? Change the band's name, for one thing, to NKOTB (not, obviously...
When TriStar executives read Kramer's diatribe, they might well have uttered joyful yelps -- the show-biz equivalent of "The Eagle has landed!" Even if their feelings were bruised, the movie's makers had reason to cheer. Now Philadelphia was not just a worthy film and a likely moneymaker; thanks to Kramer, it was a flashpoint for argument. As Demme says, with a soft laugh, "Any kind of debate about a movie is always stimulating to public interest in the film." Translation: controversy sells...
...with these money trees to be shaken, why are major professionals like Boitano (gold medalist in 1984) and Britain's Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean (also 1984 winners, in dance) returning to the upcoming Olympics? After all, their show-biz routines are smooth and easy, very scant on triple jumps. Possibly it all goes back to those patches; the new rules have reopened the doors to onetime champions who let their mastery of school figures lapse long ago. But they may feel nostalgia for the old discipline, for the satisfaction of finding, in devotion and repetition, the perfect triple jump...
Frank Zappa surely would have appreciated -- indeed, relished -- the irony ! that his death last week was, as the old show-biz line has it, a shrewd career move. The musical iconoclast, best known for his work with the seminal 1960s rock band the Mothers of Invention, was in many ways the prisoner of his own raffish image: hirsute hippie freak; countercultural sire of prototypical Valley Girl Moon Unit Zappa and her siblings Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva; opinionated crank ("AIDS is a CIA plot"); and First Amendment scourge of Tipper Gore. With his death from prostate cancer, a few days short...
...idiocy has ever been seen before. As Wilhelm, Stefan Kurt is equally good with both Buster Keaton looniness and the melodramatic pathos into which he collapses after losing his mind (and, again, his trousers). Nobody has ever made sliminess more winning than Dominique Horwitz as Pegleg. True to his show-biz heart, he doesn't disappear inside his 10-ft.-tall black coffin until he has sung some dreadful treacle about the last rose in his garden. After that, there can't be anyone in the house who isn't thinking that there's gotta be a way to keep...