Word: viewers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Popular for its satirical tone, All My Children tried to capitalize on viewer nostalgia last January, when it celebrated its 25th anniversary. The show spent a week reviewing in flashback its quarter-century on the air. It also produced a book, All My Children: The Complete Family Scrapbook, now in its fourth printing, and a nighttime retrospective to which its most famous fan, Carol Burnett, played host...
...lines for all its daytime dramas. The summer season is an important one for soaps because it offers the prospect of an expanded audience of teenagers home from school. CBS Daytime is launching a high-visibility summer campaign that includes radio, print and prime-time advertising in cities where viewer decline has been particularly precipitous, such as Atlanta, Detroit, Seattle and Washington...
...movies ought to be reviewed not by critics but by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Watching Die Hard with a Vengeance, third in the series that pits New York City cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) against a wily, chatty nut case with a fondness for TNT, the viewer simply suspends belief and coolly appraises the things that go boom. Say, wasn't that a nicely staged Wall Street explosion? My, that runaway subway train crashed onto the platform with a certain vigorous verismo. Oh, look-more actors playing dead people! So little wit is expended on the dialogue...
...still raging in Northern England, and here Gibson surprises the complacent viewer with not one, but two lengthy battle scenes. Although he effectively juxtaposes the discipline and organization of the English army with the innovation and passion of the Scots, he also resorts to one-liners and silly adolescent pranks (like plashing the enemy) that are completely at odds with the situation. Testosterone also asserts itself in the form of barbaric yawping...
Although Gibson uses his carefully-chosen themes and visual elements to good effect, the ploy is obvious. While these devices put together a decent movie, the viewer is perfectly aware that it is manufactured for the times. The whole "prima notte" issue, for example, clearly alludes to the sexual-military tactics used in Bosnia. Tentative stereotyping still mars the actors' roles including the French princess, trained to rule but unable to deny her soft female heart. Enjoying this movie calls for a generous does of cluelessness to ignore the tired machinery so obviously creaking behind the scenes...