Word: thorntons
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...movies' most memorable new face doesn't belong to a gorgeous thing named Gwyneth or Liv. It isn't all that pretty or even that new, seeing as its possessor, actor-auteur Billy Bob Thornton, is 41 and has been kicking around films for a decade. But those who have seen Thornton as Karl Childers in Sling Blade can't get that face out of their bad dreams. The skin is celibate smooth, the eyes clamped shut to keep the demons out, or in. And when the pursed mouth opens, it speaks, in a barrelly bass, of dreadful sins...
...beautifully felt performance behind that face ought to earn Thornton, who also wrote and directed Sling Blade, an Oscar nomination or two next week. The tale of Karl's return home after 25 years in a mental hospital, and of the awful temptations to repeat his crime, has already turned the actor into Hollywood's guy du jour. Clint Eastwood, Elizabeth Taylor, Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise are vocal fans of the film, and Thornton's fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton is expected to screen it at the White House soon. A perennial supporting player, Thornton is now getting fat roles...
...name may have helped Thornton get that japish citation, just as it may have hurt his early chances for serious roles ("And the Oscar goes to--Billy Bob who?"). But that has been his name since his youth, in Malvern, Arkansas, where Dad was a basketball coach and Mom was a fortune teller with, Thornton says, true psychic powers. The lad was unusual even then, says his boyhood friend Tom Epperson. "My nickname for him was Silly Slob...
...your magazine over the past few years. While I appreciate PCs as much as anyone, I'm no more interested in details about the geeks who develop them than I am in the people who perfect cellular phones. Bring us the technology, but drop the hero worship. KEVIN C. THORNTON Finksburg, Maryland...
Sling Blade may be too scrupulously attentive to the rhythms and speech of the small-town South; it easily breaks the all-time record for use of the word reckon. But as incarnated in writer-director Thornton's laconic bass voice and wonderfully shambling gait, Karl is a memorable, affecting creature--so gentle he daren't sleep on an offered bed for fear of spoiling the room's perfect primness, so righteous he will consider killing to protect his adoptive family. Sling Blade meanders when Karl isn't driving it, but for the first half-hour and the last...