Word: show-biz
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...about the motives and character of its central figure. On the other hand, the passage of time has not yet burnished away the ambiguities surrounding this affair, which might have permitted a purely mythic, Gandhi-like approach. In short, the moviemakers are backed into a corner from which neither show-biz sophistry nor a resort to the kind of radical-chic attitudes Nichols has always favored, nor yet a hundred hymns, can lift them. The final unspoken implication of this film is that Karen Silkwood's tragedy lay in the fact that she was cut down just short...
...energetic) rhinestone settings; not one of her 14 tunes offers a memorable melody or a surprising chord pattern. It does surprise that Margo Sappington's choreography is so stunningly inept, that the cast is strident and charmless. In turning some likable icons of the center-left into show-biz brats, this musical Doonesbury emerges as a vision of '70s youth only Richard Nixon could love. -By Richard Corliss
...high earnestness sweepstakes. Meyer concedes his movie "has a minimum of imagination" but thinks Dr. Strangelove is "distilled through comedy," which presumably means that his own enterprise, being so conspicuously short of humor, serves some loftier social purpose. This type of cultural con is a piece of undiluted show-biz self-protection, and a good thing too. Political immediacy is just about all The Day After has going for it. By any standards other than social, it is a terrible movie...
...currently in musical disfavor among her peers, Ronstadt has found a fresh direction. What's New, released last week by Asylum, avoids all the obvious routes. Powered by the celestial arrangements of Nelson Riddle, the album is not a sentimental journey, a dizzy camp-out or a show-biz grandstand play. It is a simple, almost reverent, rendering of nine great songs that time has not touched. At first hearing, Ronstadt's fans may be taken aback by the suave but swinging Riddle orchestra, by the playfulness and sophistication of the lyrics, by the tidal pulls of strong...
...jazz and soul, 500 of Charles' friends and fellow musicians showed up at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles. The result is Ray Charles, a Man and His Soul, a TV special that Producer Dick Clark is syndicating nationally in September. Among those who sang Charles' praises: Glen Campbell, Lou Rawls and, by recorded message, Stevie Wonder, who was pretaped doing an old Charles hit slightly reworked into Hallelujah, I Love Ray So. Tears and cheers are the hallmark finish to such show-biz bashes. Charles provided both with his familiar, still wrenching rendition of America the Beautiful...