Word: tomming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Tom, that handsome devil of a network reporter, might not know the difference between Jim Bakker's sex pawn and Jessica McClure. He sure doesn't know the difference between millions and billions in a Defense Department cost-overrun story he's working on. But he knows how to shed a calculated tear on-camera during a human-interest interview. In one sense, Tom is the reverse of Bud Fox: he isn't bright, but he's smart -- smart enough to use his looks and his nice, helpful, attractive attitude to get intelligent people to push him toward stardom...
...gets all the great women. One, anyway: Jane Craig, daredevil news producer. Jane (Holly Hunter) is so focused that even her sobbing fits are controlled; she performs them each morning like aerobics. She is properly repelled by Tom, and improperly attracted to him. Improperly, because she has a perfect pal -- not a soul mate exactly, but a brain mate -- in Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), a warm, supercompetent, underappreciated reporter, the Jimmy Olsen of Mensa. Aaron can spit out pertinent facts about Gaddafi, he can get drunk and sing along in flawless French to a Francis Cabrel tune, he can love...
...Modern Romance) is the all-time appealing schlemiel, notably in a laugh-nightmare when he anchors the network news and sweats his career down the tubes. (Says one appalled technician: "This is more than Nixon ever sweated.") Hurt is neat too, never standing safely outside his character, always allowing Tom to find the humor in his too-rapid success, locating a dimness behind his eyes when Tom is asked a tough question -- and for Tom, poor soulless sensation-to-be, all questions are tough ones. As for Hunter, she graduates with honors from off-Broadway (The Miss Firecracker Contest...
...anticlimax. Maybe no one believes in happy endings anymore, or even in endings. Maybe, after Bakker and Hart and Iranamuck, people are too cynical to care who gets the girl. But it is good to know that craftsmen like Brooks can create compelling, pertinent folks like Jane, Aaron and Tom. Can we hope that they will spin off into their own high sitcom? That would give us something, at least, to look forward...
...Gorbachev has been sending signals that it is ready -- even desperate -- to disentangle itself from Afghanistan. On the eve of this week's summit meeting between the Soviet leader and President Ronald Reagan, the pace of the diplomatic maneuvering quickened. Before leaving Moscow for Washington, Gorbachev told NBC's Tom Brokaw that if the U.S. really wanted to find a "political" solution to the conflict, "it could be done very quickly." For his part, Reagan said in a speech last week that it was time for the Soviet troops in Afghanistan to "pack up, pull out and go home...