Word: unless
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Eddie Quinn turns to his wife Maureen and warns her against trying to figure him out. "You can't understand my obscurity," he says, "unless you have infrared vision." Actually, Eddie, the flailing loser played by Sean Penn in the new lower-depths romance She's So Lovely, is as easy to read as the funny papers. He loves the mouthy Maureen (Penn's own wife Robin Wright Penn) and will do anything to keep her or get her back. Penn, though, is a more challenging read: Studs Lonigan, say, rewritten by Brando's tougher kid brother...
...director is apparently buggy for bugs and for strange, trusting children. For its first hour--up to and including that airborne kidnapping of our heroine--Mimic is a suavely creepy essay in entomophobia. Then the film gets a severe case of the stupes. The creatures keep Susan alive (inexplicable unless she is meant to be mated with the king bug), and they stop evolving into humans (so we never, alas, see the final stage of a really uggy bug-man). Horror-film heroines are typically doomed to lose their wits halfway through the picture. This time it happened...
...actor has copied the President's hair color, body language and a remarkably accurate honey-dipped Arkansas accent. "I'm really playing him," admits the actor, who studied hours of videotapes to prep for his latest face/off. "It's false p.r. for me to do it any other way...unless there are some legal issues I don't know about...
...Barry, Brimmer is black, but there the similarities end. While Barry is fond of dashikis and rambling rhetoric, Brimmer is as precise and exacting as the cut of his charcoal-gray suit. He took immediate action last week, firing three department chiefs and threatening that more heads will roll unless changes are made. Still, some are skeptical of his ability to tackle a job akin to fixing a plane while flying it. "I can't predict the outcome, but I can predict the effort," Brimmer says. "It will be done...
...this? One excuse is that the well off and the middle class must be bribed to allow the government to do anything for the poor. For instance, they will not support subsidized school lunches for poor kids unless their own children also get cheap food. But the real reason is that everyone who gets a government benefit comes to regard it as a sacred right that must never be taken away. Or reduced. Or even increased less rapidly. Witness the screaming after a panel of economists suggested the consumer price index overstates inflation. Why? Adjusting the index would lead...