Word: slings
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...belong to a gorgeous thing named Gwyneth or Liv. It isn't all that pretty or even that new, seeing as its possessor, actor-auteur Billy Bob Thornton, is 41 and has been kicking around films for a decade. But those who have seen Thornton as Karl Childers in Sling Blade can't get that face out of their bad dreams. The skin is celibate smooth, the eyes clamped shut to keep the demons out, or in. And when the pursed mouth opens, it speaks, in a barrelly bass, of dreadful sins and Old Testament vengeance. Karl is a slow...
...beautifully felt performance behind that face ought to earn Thornton, who also wrote and directed Sling Blade, an Oscar nomination or two next week. The tale of Karl's return home after 25 years in a mental hospital, and of the awful temptations to repeat his crime, has already turned the actor into Hollywood's guy du jour. Clint Eastwood, Elizabeth Taylor, Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise are vocal fans of the film, and Thornton's fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton is expected to screen it at the White House soon. A perennial supporting player, Thornton is now getting fat roles...
...Arkansas in 1991, Thornton is never scarier than when he smiles--the picture of boll-weevil evil. He's good at that. "Billy can organize all the madmen inside himself," says John Ritter, the Three's Company refugee who gets a career makeover as a gentle gay man in Sling Blade. "If Horton Foote and David Lynch ran at each other at 100 m.p.h. and collided head on, the result would be someone like Billy Bob." In his spare moments, Thornton got married. Four times...
...went, Eeeewegh. Then I came up with the monologue, with the voice. I thought it was a pretty good character." He performed the monologue as part of a one-man show, then filmed it as a short that he used to raise money for the feature. The full-length Sling Blade was made for $1 million. Last year Miramax Films bought it for $10 million and signed Thornton to a three-picture deal...
...Sling Blade may be too scrupulously attentive to the rhythms and speech of the small-town South; it easily breaks the all-time record for use of the word reckon. But as incarnated in writer-director Thornton's laconic bass voice and wonderfully shambling gait, Karl is a memorable, affecting creature--so gentle he daren't sleep on an offered bed for fear of spoiling the room's perfect primness, so righteous he will consider killing to protect his adoptive family. Sling Blade meanders when Karl isn't driving it, but for the first half-hour and the last...