Word: slapdash
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Congress jets home after a slapdash and slapstick session
...rate, the political tempo of the arms control issue has been irreversibly accelerated. A vitally important debate--in which the slapdash Freeze! is only a marginally useful source of information--is now raging. The power of such grassroots controversy to affect policy has been confirmed by Ted Kennedy's eagerness to capitalize on it, and by Ronald Reagan's efforts to thwart it. And that potential is perhaps the best reason for hoping that the initiative for arms control has permanently shifted to the people in the streets and away, from even the most well-meaning of politicians...
...gives Wilson an easy out: "I'm okay for a person, honey," says the mother--and the "honey" makes her sound just like the lady in the Scott Towels commercials--"but I'm no good for a character." Well, she said it. This really is a meretricious, slapdash little nothing of a play--there are better improvisations in acting classes. But Lanford Wilson is considered a major playwright in some circles (particularly the Circle Rep, whose production this is), and it's easy to imagine APS's artistic director Tom Bloom crouched under Wilson's kitchen table, pouncing ferociously...
...dark good looks of a gnome gigolo. His mannerisms seem as if the director might have bought them at a movie-memorabilia shop: gestures from Cagney, a voice as wispy as Peter Lorre's, sardonic smiles from the early John Cassavetes. But they are perfectly suitable to the slapdash style and gravelly tone of a film that uses Method acting to conceal, and then reveal, the workings of a soft old Hollywood heart...
Strangely enough, it is this slapdash indictment of the American system that differentiates these first "summer" films of the eighties from movies of other summers. Neither of these films has a political consciousness to speak of, and both are only mildly--and spottily--entertaining. But each takes a stab at the American capitalist system and the Protestant ethic of hard work and honesty. And in each film, the American way of life takes a beating, handily defeated by chicanery, theft and vice...