Word: smarts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Mary Poppins worked, at a level higher than efficient and just this side of splendid. The pleasures of Grey Gardens are more mixed. It boasts a glorious performance by Christine Ebersole as both mother and daughter (I'll explain later), and Best Support by Mary Louise Wilson, in a smart show whose main deficiency is exactly what so many modern musicals lack: good music...
...prime-time TV characters are more American than Betty Suarez. On ABC's hit comedy-soap Ugly Betty, she's a fashion-magazine assistant who is distinctly unfashionable--chunky sweaters, frizzy hair, bear-trap braces--but succeeds through good old Yankee values like perseverance, optimism and hard work. Smart and sweet-hearted, she embodies the Puritan-Shaker-Quaker principle of valuing inner good over outer appearance. She's as Norman Rockwell as a chestnut-stuffed turkey. The actress who plays her is even named America Ferrera...
...ease, changed all that in a whirlwind few years (1940-44) at Paramount, where he auteured an incredible eight films--amazing in their quantity and quality. Seven of those comedies (all but The Miracle of Morgan's Creek) are amassed here as a reminder of how fast, reckless and smart movies can be. Sturges' social satire fizzes in The Great McGinty and Hail the Conquering Hero. But the pearl is The Lady Eve, with con artiste Barbara Stanwyck seducing naive Henry Fonda on the high seas and, just for fun, doing it again as a different woman on land...
...father, a distinguished economist himself and chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers under Nixon and briefly under Ford, forever stood in awe of the man. As my pop said many times, "Friedman was like every other economics student at Chicago in those days except twice as smart...
...actor client, while keeping under wraps the fact that he "has a slight recurring case of homosexuality." Thus the groundwork is laid for a "trenchant satire about truth and illusion Hollywood-style" (in the words of the New York Times). But almost nothing in this play is smart enough for satire, or even makes much sense. The project the agent is seeking for the client she doesn't want outed is... a play about two gay lovers. (There's some twisted logic here, but don't ask.) The actor, meanwhile, is involved in a relationship with a waiflike rent...