Word: undersung
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...Each individual top 10 list is like its own steeplechase through the international canon. Look at Michael Chabon's. He heads it up with Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths. (Nice: an undersung masterpiece by a writer's writer.) He follows that up with by Pale Fire by Nabokov at #2. (Hm. Does he really think it's better than Lolita? Really?) Then with number 3 he goes straight off the reservation: Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini. (What? By who?) The whole exercise is an orgy of intellectual second-guessing, which as we all know is infinitely more fun than the first...
...anyway, undersung. Turner Classic Movies did run a four-day tribute to Mann last month, and that was nice, even if TCM didn't include his late masterpiece, the epic El Cid. I also hear that Jeanine Basinger's excellent 1978 study of the director may be issued by Wesleyan University Press, though at the moment the book can be found only in a bilingual edition published two years ago by the San Sebastian Film Festival, and then only if you ask the author to send you a copy. (Thank you, Jeanine...
STARTING OVER SYNDICATED, Check Local Listings This undersung daytime show takes elements of reality TV and talk shows and improves on both. Here, six women with problems from financial dependence to emotional aloofness spend weeks under one roof in the care of counselors. The show's pop-psych devices can be bizarre--one woman and her "life coach" role-play a dialogue with her absentee dad using sock puppets--but the results are genuinely moving. It's refreshing to see a reality show about a group of women--some in their 40s--who aren't babes looking...
...unusual to talk about someone who makes TV movies as having themes, a voice, an oeuvre. Scratch that: it's unusual to talk about someone who makes TV movies, period. Yet within this undersung field, writer-director Jane Anderson has wrought a body of wry and poignant work about women and power. Her 1993 The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom for HBO won her a writing Emmy and helped define a kind of off-kilter, fact-based drama that has become a pay-cable staple. Showtime's 1998 The Baby Dance, about the class tension...
...Undersung Losers of the Evening: Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter and company. Among the greatest benefactors of the Clinton Administration's largesse have been the hot young stars of the conservative commentariat, who've risen to talk-show stardom in opposition to the White House. With Republicans running each branch of the government, who will be left to oppose for the ratings? Will they be forced to take unglamorous, poorly paid jobs actually helping to run the country...