Word: stardom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wanted to be a musical-comedy star, and "I plan to be a success," said Vanessa Williams after winning the 1984 Miss America title. But the shock of her nude photos in Penthouse nine months later cost her the title and all likelihood of immediate stardom. In the year since, she has been slowly working her way back, with a forgettable guest shot on a TV detective series last fall and a turn among the many performers at last month's reopening of Harlem's Apollo Theater. This week at Manhattan's South Street Theater, she gets...
...with the inflation of minor talents into major ones, of mere promise into claims on art history. It is that the one has produced the other. In the process, too many painters have been left without a middle ground between the miseries of oblivion and the stresses of cultural stardom. Hence fame depends, to a grotesque and absurd extent, on painters' ability to excite envy among their rivals, and the sense of common reciprocity that pervaded the art world up to ten years ago is drying out. Where it still exists, it is more to be found west...
...adaptation of Stick, which he has written with Joseph C. Stinson: lots of plotting, but no compelling narrative drive; plenty of characterological tics, but no characters whom one really cares for. In the title role, Burt Reynolds has somehow mislaid that cheeky brightness that is the basis of his stardom. His performance is so muted it is sometimes hard to hear his lines, and he has directed the film in the same torpid spirit. This story of an ex-con whose moral code imposes on him a mission of revenge among the drug traffickers around Miami is lazy, dull...
...present form, Rice's story has holes to plug and a narrative in need of streamlining, but it offers him a contemporary setting for his favorite theme: the pernicious lure of stardom, whether biblical, political or intellectual. His lyrics mix roguish wit (Bangkok contains the unlikely couplet "Tea, girls--warm and sweet--warm, sweet/ Some are set up in the Somerset Maugham suite") with the blistering bitterness of Evita. Andersson and Ulvaeus' score ransacks melodic styles from plainsong to Puccini to Gilbert and Sullivan to Richard Rodgers to Phil Spector to hip-hop, in a rock- symphonic synthesis ripe with...
...center are two of the movies' most engaging young actors: Goldblum, with his stolid, vulpine charm, and Pfeiffer. Trim, smart and drop-dead gorgeous, Pfeiffer has been nibbling at stardom since her stints in Grease II and Scarface. Now, by animating this sparkling thriller-satire with her seen- it-all elegance, she has every right to feast...