Word: slater
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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NONFICTION: The Chief, Lance Morrow -- Citizen Hughes, Michael Drosnin -- Henry James: Literary Criticism, edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson -- The Periodic Table, Primo Levi -- Up for Grabs, John Rothchild -- A Vanished Present: The Memoirs of Alexander Pasternak, edited by Ann Pasternak Slater...
...18th century Moscow Post Office, a structure that he invests with churning life. In a paean to the Mushroom Market on the banks of the Moscow River, the author offers pungent and densely textured scenes of ancient commerce, which have been fluently rendered by his niece, Ann Pasternak Slater. "Everything was primitively displayed in open barrels, the frozen carcasses of great fish simply laid straight on the snow," he writes. "Pickled, soused, and salted products stood in ranks . . . vats of bilberry, cranberry, cloudberry...
Cynics will call this a B-team Superman. Screenwriter David Odell and Director Jeannot Szwarc concentrate on strong, simple pleasures: Slater's easy grace and uncomplicated beauty; the bravura of (Obi-Wan) O'Toole, shameless and affecting as he just about tears a planet to tatters; and a hilarious wicked-witch turn by the delicious Dunaway. The climactic confrontation, in which man's fate is decided by two women, could elicit thrills of laughter from a Saturday-matinee benefit performance...
This time, the fickle finger of film-fame fate fell on Helen Slater, yet another graduate of the much "Famed" High School of the Performing Arts in New York. Her performance shows the trademarks of that institution's actors: mere competence so polished that all traces of character have been rubbed out. Slater, cute as she is, overwhelms the film with her dullness...
...Slater's spectacular colorlessness cannot be attributed to her lack of talent alone. Director Jeannot Szwarc, with the blood of "Jaws II" already on his hands, is carrying out his own niche as a hatchetman of promising sequels. Given a cast of the most talented hams in Hollywood, he squeezes as bland a performance as possible from each one. Dunaway is left to rehash the residue of her Joan Crawfordisms from "Mommy Dearest," charging through some genuinely funny lines with the comic timing...