Word: spader
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Critical Care tells the story of Dr. Werner Ernst (a groggy James Spader) a young gun working in an ultra high-tech intensive care unit who's looking to make it big. That is, he's looking to get rich and sleep with as many women as possible on the way up. Ernst spends his days tending to patients whose state of health runs the gamut from vegetative to permanently comatose-a foreshadowing of the film's extremely limited scope. His one patient who is actually conscious is a terminally ill dialysis case (played with stunning grace by Jeffery Wright...
...Brooks is but one painful example of talent going to waste: it's another case of good actors trying their damnedest with bad lines. Kyra Sedgwick, James Spader, Albert Brooks and Helen Mirren are all fine, subtle performers; here, they are relegated to stale, two-dimensional stereo-types. Lumet may as well have subtitles put in key scenes: "This man is evil, because all he cares about is money. This man is good, because he really cares about making people better...
Fade in on a luscious blond, sleek as a vintage Corvette, who presses her breast against a car hood while an anonymous man caresses her skin as if it were rich Corinthian leather. The scene is from a film being shot by director James Ballard (James Spader), and the star is Ballard's wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger...
Similarly, Phillip White's Claudius is not regal and controlling, but rather slimy and pretentious. When he commands Hamlet to "be as us in Denmark," White is less like a cool, calculating usurper and more like a glib James Spader. He's irreverent and funny, but the eloquence of his "o, my offence is rank" speech is undercut by the flippancy of the rest of his portrayal...
...steal big. If you're caught, you can always claim you were doing an homage. Director Roland Emmerich's chief honorees are the Indiana Jones and Star Wars sagas. In a prologue set in 1928, archaeologists in Egypt uncover a large metallic ring. Fifty years later, Daniel Jackson (James Spader), a nerdy but stalwart linguist, deciphers the ring's hieroglyphics. They suggest it was left behind centuries ago by supersmart aliens (oh, hi there, 2001). By twiddling a few dials, scientists set the ring humming, and Jackson and a quarrelsome combat team led by Colonel Jack O'Neil (a glum...