Word: truman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this option out of being absorbed with metacommentaries that accounts for the draw of The Truman Show. Netting the most of any movie this summer ($60 million), this movie had an irresistible premise: a man whose entire life has been a drama broadcast into living rooms suddenly realizes that even his most natural moments occur according to a rehearsed script. Though we laughed when his wife looked directly into the camera to advertise a cooking product and when the show's director prompted, "Cue the sun!", the movie's emotional center was Truman's exit. The movie broke...
Playing around with the contrivances of Hollywood is fun, but Truman wants simply to live a real life without wondering whether or not the people around him are honest. Even if there was a hint of mocking in Americans' pinning on "Free Truman" buttons this summer, they were still--on some level--refusing to let the media dictate the substance of our lives. Just ask the woman in the seat in front of me about this movie that allowed the star to give up his artificial stardom; she couldn't stop gushing, `This is the best movie I've ever...
...Clinton took his cue from The Truman Show, he'd know that he can't keep blaming the media forever. At some time, we're all going to get tired of thinking about a story's "spin" and come back to wonder whether there is, in fact, a story to tell. After all, even though we, the television audience, know it's ridiculous for Ally McBeal to keep hearing secrets in the law firm's bathroom, we still forgive it, for sake of unfolding the plot. Heck, it is TV, and she has to find out somehow...
DIED. CLARK CLIFFORD, 91, consummate Washington insider; in Bethesda, Md. Tall, elegant and impeccably attired, Clifford advised four Democratic Presidents, using a knack for crystallizing issues to advocate causes from civil rights to environmental protection. An architect of Harry S Truman's 1948 election victory, he later counseled winding down the Vietnam War as Lyndon Johnson's Defense Secretary. Says TIME's Hugh Sidey: "He had a genius for reducing things to their simplest terms but fell to a tragic and false sense of invulnerability." Clifford's chairmanship of a bank embroiled in international scandal led to 1992 criminal charges...
Eddie Murphy--bald, blissful and guileless--is top-billed in this clever, derivative comedy (think The Truman Show with lower ratings) about a wandering shaman who stumbles into fame on a home shopping network. But the real star is Jeff Goldblum as the network's frazzled manager. With his lupine smile and fake-intimate voice, he pushes a line of patter that is just a bit too slick to pass for charm. And when his life starts crumbling, you can almost smell his comic flop sweat through the screen. Tom Schulman's script is smart about the media's ability...