Word: tuffe
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...FABULOUS THUNDERBIRDS: Tuff Enuff (CBS Associated Records). There is a long tradition of honky-tonking in American music that runs way back, considerably before rock, to the blues bars, jazz joints and love parlors where rag and Dixie got going from the turn of the century on. These days, call a group a bar band and you mean they play rock with no fuss and maybe a little sloppiness that can pass for funk. The Fabulous Thunderbirds, who made their first album in 1979 and have opened concerts for the Rolling Stones, still have the true chugalug spirit...
...gritty songs about lost affection and spiritual redemption earned rough- and-ready Tina Turner two 1985 Grammys, securing her crown as the comeback queen of rock 'n' roll. Next Turner's fans will get a chance to see her strut her tuff in Mad Max III, the Road Warrior sequel to be released this summer. For the latest installment of the adventure series, set in postapocalypse Australia, Turner, 46, plays Aunty Entity, the hardhearted ruler of a barbaric outpost known as Bartertown. No, love's got nothing to do with it; instead of falling for Swoon Symbol Mel Gibson...
...here come seven new youth movies to glut the glut. Tuff Turf, a gang movie set in Los Angeles, plays like the Beat It video at feature length. Fandango sends five college guys on a West Texas spree. Heaven Help Us has five Roman Catholic schoolboys getting cute in the confessional and decapitating a statue of their school's patron saint. Mischief pairs a wimp and a stud in the small-town '50s. In Tomboy, Betsy Russell is a Flashdance- style mechanic who goes stock-car racing. In Vision Quest, Rocky pins Flashdance on the high school wrestling...
Several recent films, most notably The Outsiders, have played on this adolescence violence theme in an apparent attempt to link youthful energy, usually directed against others, with some kind of statement about what it means to be young in America. But Tuff Turf reaches a new nadir of gratuitous violence masquerading as moral message. What makes this especially curious is the true lack (in the first part of the movie, at least) of overt sex. The film really does try to convey a feeling of "nice guys finish first" while attempting to retain a real-world grounding...
...Tuff Turf tries to reconcile two essentially irreconcilable methods of artistically treating youth in America--either powerfully, viscerally, and almost animalistically, like West Side Story, or neurotically and confusedly like any one of a number of Robby Benson movies. If Morgan Hiller is really a perceptive, intelligent New England prep school teenager, why does he fall so quickly in love with a rather stupid Los Angeles gang girl, thereby subjecting himself to violent beatings and possible death? And if he is a hopeless romantic, why does he have such neurotic, pseudo-intellectual conversations and relationships with the people around...