Word: touche
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kaufman rightly objected to being called a comedian. But he was, perhaps, a mordant self-satirist, perpetually in touch with, loving and loathing, his inner child, the lonely little Long Island boy, consoled by his obsessive interest in the trashiest manifestations of pop culture. It was his luck to come on the scene in the '70s, just as a generation that had been shaped--blighted--by the same pop materials was arriving at self-consciousness. The natural impulse of the members of that generation was to nostalgize pop culture and their own innocent response to it. On the other hand...
...persuade you that old-fashioned commerce is as dead as disco. Unless, of course, you've been to a mall lately, where the parking lot is packed and you can spend a vacation day in line to pay for a shirt. Malls still offer plenty of advantages. You can touch, compare and try on the merchandise--important for items like shoes. And, of course, you can buy it today. We still love instant gratification...
Technology continues to make things worse. Before digital clocks and watches became common, people rounded to the nearest five minutes when telling each other the time: now we give the exact minute. Before cell phones and faxes and answering machines, we accepted being out of touch. Before the Internet, we didn't feel entitled (much less obliged) to shop or do research or work around the clock...
...prove the obvious: that we live in a chance universe, that coincidence and mishap play a larger role in our destinies than we like to think. In Magnolia he intertwines four disparate (but equally glum) stories of people living in California's San Fernando Valley and shows how they touch--or fail to touch--one another in the course of a single, very long...
...crippled quarterback, finally letting the inner bitch residing beneath her cool jock's-wife beauty savagely surface. The trouble with the movie is its style, all handheld shots and short, jagged cuts. They're supposed to represent the barely controlled anarchy of the sport (and to let Stone touch on far too many narrative points). But almost three hours of this jitter deteriorates from bravura filmmaking to annoying mannerism, and Any Given Sunday ends up less than the sum of its many, often interesting parts...