Word: waterstones
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...really doing anything. Throughout the entire film, Cimino cuts away from key scenes before they seem even half over. It's like a two-and-a-half-hour-long coming attraction. We get only fragments of performances from fine actors like Christopher Walken, Isabelle Huppert, John Hurt, and Sam Waterston. And then there's Kris Kristofferson as James Averill, the film's central character, a Harvard-educated Federal Marshall: He's a zombie...
...sensation to be searching for comic relief in a comedy. But certain smoggy patches of Lunch Hour do tend to induce that quest. Possibly the two funniest moments in Act I are Gilda Radner sparring with a spilled pot of coffee and juggling a scalding-hot spoon, and Sam Waterston watching the page proofs of his upcoming book unreel inexorably into a goldfish tank. All of which goes to prove that Director Mike Nichols is still a playwright's best friend...
...domesticity who regaled us with Please Don't Eat the Daisies and The Snake Has All the Lines. Trust her to keep a civilized, witty tongue in her head whatever her characters' antics. Lunch Hour is a tale of extramarital hanky-panky without the id. Oliver (Sam Waterston) and Nora (Susan Kellermann) have rented the upper half of a Southampton beach house that Designer Oliver Smith must have had in mind for Neiman-Marcus. Oliver is a marriage counselor. He may have counseled his mother and father. Nora is a leggy, braless blond goddess with a slightly crisp...
...essentially linear plot, this one seems to require an excess of exposition, and the film lacks both snappy comic writing and truly suspenseful action. Beatty aside, the minor characters are not developed with much flair. Sam Waterston, as a onetime Matthau protege in the agency now forced to lead the pursuit of his mentor, is bland in a blandly written role. Herbert Lorn, as Matthau's friendly rival from the U.S.S.R., is too friendly for the good of the picture. The film lacks a needed air of menace...
...push himself harder, for Capricorn One could be better. If the film had a few fewer plot holes, a bit more narrative depth and far less signposting dialogue, it might even have been a space-age Manchurian Candidate. A classier cast would also have helped. Gould, Holbrook and Waterston are all in fine, easygoing form, but Brolin and Simpson are useless heroes: they are not big enough stars or good enough actors to make us care about their fates...