Word: wagner
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...first slot, Brad Desaulniers pulled off the most impressive victory of his freshman season by upsetting Victor Wagner in four games. Wagner, whom Crimson coach Dave Fish considered likely to defeat Desaulniers and who last year ranked as one of the nation's finest players, played a steady and often masterful match and captured the first game...
Directed by Joel Schumacher Screenplay by Jane Wagner Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner are determined that this time nothing shall go wrong. Their last film, Moment by Moment, about an affair between a bored housewife (Tomlin) and a young drifter (John Travolta), was the movie catastrophe of 1978. Now they would play it safe by playing it funny...
Tomlin and Wagner have no such grand ideas. They aim only to poke fun at the American houseperson's conspicuous consumption - a bizarrely anachronistic target in the '80s, when every Jane Doe scrutinizes her biodegradable cereal box to make sure it has enough vitamins and minerals. So the film's first half mines the comfy-cozy, utterly on-pitch humor of an old Carol Burnett skit. In the happy California suburb of Tasty Meadows, every room is decorated in the pastels of progressive kindergartens, and the residents' chief concern is ring around the collar. In this...
Soon after the hilarious Douglas Show sequence, though, Shrinking Woman starts to deteriorate. Schumacher and Wagner cop out; their cruel and gleeful dissection of the tacky American bourgeoisie stops in mid-slice: there are no more scences of Pat and her hubby getting frisky to the beat of Muzak disco, no more jokes about Explodo-Gum, the treat that causes green saliva to ooze from the mouths of sweet-toothed kids. Instead, the filmmakers concentrate on a hackneyed sub-plot about the Organization for World Management, a sinister group of slick, young corporate types who plot to control the world...
...true conviction that you're forced to, at least, let out a light chuckle. If only Shrinking Woman could have maintained the comic intelligence that Tomlin displays, it could have been a much needed clever satire. But instead, it lacks the courage to fulfill its initial convictions. Schumacher and Wagner would have been better off leaving clever Simians to Tarzan and Clint Eastwood...