Word: stoltz
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...narrative and the irresistible appeal of his storytelling. Monologist Spalding Gray brings a feisty and brooding quality to the customarily benign stage manager: if his halfhearted attempts at a New Hampshire accent fail, the laughs he evokes are both frequent and authentic to the text. Film actors Eric Stoltz (Mask) and Penelope Ann Miller (Biloxi Blues) portray the young lovers, and it is hard to imagine that their soda-shop infatuation scene has ever been performed better. Miller, though, is not quite up to the last act's demands of kittenish adolescence combined with otherworldly grace. The rest...
Some Kind of Wonderful rather too starkly exhibits Hughes' standard procedure. It has one of his attractive misfits, shy, sensitive Keith (Eric Stoltz) obsessively trying to steal popular, vapid Amanda (Lea Thompson) away from her rich, bullying boyfriend. Keith does not notice that his lifelong best buddy, Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson, who is fine), has, for all her tomboyish ways, grown into a much more interesting and sexy girl than Amanda. Or that she truly loves him. That recognition is for the last minute, and it teaches Keith, Amanda and the whole school lessons in personal integrity...
...Lahr's Cowardly Lion. Rocky's rare disease, craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, ended his life at 16, in 1978. And yet (of course) he was one of nature's noblemen, loved by puppies, blind girls and the motorcycle gang his mother Rusty hung out with. "I look weird," says Rocky (Eric Stoltz, in a wonderfully authentic performance), "but otherwise I'm real normal." Better than normal. He shines in school, plays Cupid between his mom (Cher) and a rowdy old friend (Sam Elliott), and falls into tender love with a City Lights sweetie (Laura Dern) who can see only his good heart...
...Newcomer Stoltz bursts through the constraints of the film's perpetually lefthanded direction with a charm and bravado that Bogdanovich would be wise to emulate. Stoltz's Rocky meanders through his teenage life unblemished by bitterness and remorse, leaving a trail of warmth and good cheer in his wake. Whether he's conning his friends out of valuable baseball cards in order to complete a series of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, dreaming about biking through Europe on a Harley after graduation, fantasizing about what it's like to have a girlfriend, he gallops his way into our hearts. Although...
Bogdanovich's incessant fumbling stains Mask with the "what-might-have-been" syndrome of a good idea lost in poor direction. Instead of another Elephant Man, which could have showcased the acting talents of Stoltz, Cher and Elliott to their best advantages, we get People presents the Life and Times of Rocky Stoltz...