Word: squirming
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Good schlock--like An American Werewolf in London or Risky Business--steps gingerly just this side of outright derision of its subjects. Bad schlock--St. Elmo's Fire--hates its characters intensely and usually ends up by offending us or making us squirm...
...something else. Ivy games are certainly no criminal offense against PBS's mandate, and the public stations need all the good will they can get. Public broadcasting executives should start to ask themselves, though, how far they can go in sacrificing their programming and policy orientation as they squirm to keep their stations in the black. And the federal officials who manage public broadcasting's central inances should be wary of dangers to PBS's credibility as an impartial and pluralistic network. Meanwhile, however, on a somewhat selfish level. I'm glad we were able to watch Game...
...recent movies impose on both mind and body. Back in the 1930s, when a double feature could sprint through the sprockets in 2½ hours, Columbia Pictures Mogul Harry Cohn announced that "I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it's bad. If my fanny doesn't squirm, it's good." To which Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz cracked, "Imagine-the whole world wired to Harry Conn's ass!" Oddly enough, Cohn deserves the last laugh; more than a few current films could benefit from...
That squalor, the play's major motive force, makes the production worth squirming for. Shepard's tools for inducing that Squirm aren't much subtler than the "starving class" metaphor of the title, which, despite numerous references in the dialogue, never surpasses the self-conscious (they're emotionally starving, you see). Emma (Molly White) the younger of the two gawky adolescents, is having her first period, as the mother constantly reminds father and brother to excuse her behavior. Wesley (Steven Gutwillig), her brother, urinates on a heap of Emma's painstakingly drawn posters. Shepard isn't one for the soft...
...study, conducted in conjunction with McHugh & Hoffman, a TV consulting firm, will not be released officially for a few weeks, but it is already making network executives squirm. The report is based on a poll of 1,500 viewers and follows up a similar study made six years ago. The responses, which come from all rungs on the socioeconomic ladder, indicate that TV is playing an increasingly less important role in people's lives...