Word: toying
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Next week the autumn logjam will begin to break, as Hollywood releases the first of a promising mix of films. Three movies head the insiders' early line of likely hits: The Toy, a Richard Pryor comedy; Tootsie, starring Dustin Hoffman in drag; and 48 Hrs., an Odd Couple cop film with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. Four other films are touted as hot Oscar contenders: The Verdict, in which Paul Newman plays a burnt-out Boston lawyer; Frances, a Hollywood horror story starring Jessica Lange; Sophie's Choice, with Meryl Streep as William Styron's tragic heroine...
...such influences are melded into a wholly modernist idiom. Hodgkin does to the Indian miniature what Matisse did to Islamic decoration; the source is not simply quoted but transformed. The miniaturist's precision of edge and line is replaced by a fuzzy, affable kind of formal system-nursery-toy versions, almost, of the sphere, cube and cylinder, those intimidating Platonic solids of programmatic modernism. His pigment, however, has an extraordinary range of effect. His work sports in the transparency, density and sweet pastiness that only oil paint can give. Surfeited by color, twinkling with fields of dots (like enlarged...
...using this format in a cleverly literal way. The film opens with a burst of dialogue breaking the stolid silence of some suburban Elm St. "I told you not to read this crap! Where did you get this shit?" an irate dad yells at his son cowering among toy monsters in the bedroom. The father snatches the latest issue of "Creepshow" from the boy's hands. The camera then focuses on the comic book as it lies in the front lawn garbage can, letting the wind-ruffled pages tell each story by segueing from animated stills to live film...
...clung to the founder's ugly acronym (Epcot stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), they have departed from his Utopian concept of a real-life community evolving in harmony with an ever changing and beneficent technology. What they have wrought is not the town but the adult toy of the future. Epcot is a mind-pummeling assault of electronic ingenuity, historical fact, fancy, showmanship, faith, hope...
...rather startled when Wendy Potasnik, 9, stood on tiptoe before his desk to file suit against Borden, Inc., the huge food and chemical-products company based in Columbus, Ohio. It seems that Wendy got to the bottom of a box of Cracker Jack one day and found no free toy, as advertised. Recalls her mother: "She was so sad-faced." Wendy wrote to Borden to complain, but received no response. So she and her father composed a complaint asking the court for a replacement box of Cracker Jack and $19 to cover court costs. Says Wendy in her suit...