Word: thespians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Leyner's paranoid rhapsodies continue in "Great Prentenders," an essay on the dominance of a thespian conspiracy in modern society--the idea that your neighbors, for example, are not really neighbors, but actors hired by realestate salesmen to convey the image of an ideal neighborhood. Leyner calls this the "De Niro-ization' of culture...Migratory shifts back and forth from the real to the simulacrum [that] will calibrate the rest of history." "The Mary Poppins Kidnapping" pokes fun at the over-sensitive parents who worry that all forms of media, even the innocuous products of Disney, are dangerous influences...
...wild card at their rehearsal table is Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly), chorine, ineptly aspiring thespian and gangster's moll. Nick, her mobster lover (Joe Viterelli), is backing the show, in which, nasal accent and all, she is supposed to play a psychiatrist. Nick supplies Olive with a bodyguard. Try to cut one of her lines and you have a hood named Cheech (playwright-actor Chazz Palminteri) to deal with...
...loses its momentum and continues its death march on the shoulders of Johnny Depp, in the title role, an exemplary actor who can't do much more than smile heroically in the face of every humiliation. Sometimes this is funny. "Really?" Depp says, sounding like Jon Lovitz's Master Thespian on Saturday Night Live. "Worst film you ever saw? Well, my next one'll be better...
...insulting. Director Redford and screenwriter Paul Attanasio have converted a fascinating and complex episode in TV history into a simplistic morality play, with TV as the bad guy in virtually every scene. Jack Barry, host of Twenty- One, rehearses to himself before the show like some hammy dinner-theater thespian. When the quiz shows come on, Average Joes troop home to their TV set like sheep to the slaughter (with those same emblematic '50s-family-glued-to- th e-TV shots that Stone uses in Natural Born Killers). Every TV executive is a cartoon villain, from sleazy Twenty-One producer...
Even if Matt has not changed quite as radicallyas it might seem, he's undeniably different fromthe strangely nerdy thespian who came to Harvard."I started smoking pot in college," Matt offers byway of explanation for his evolution...