Word: wiggen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Henry Wiggen is a winner-a blond-and-blue-eyed All-America baseball hero, golden, graceful and uncomplicated. Julian Weston is a maggot-pale homosexual prostitute, strung out like a taut wire between self-inflicted denigration and a yearning for clean, well-lighted love. What these totally disparate characters-the one in John Hancock's film Bang the Drum Slowly, the other in English Playwright John Hopkins' Broadway drama Find Your Way Home -have in common is the very uncommon talent of Actor Michael Moriarty, who plays them both. With the release of the film in August...
Nobody would write a poem about Henry Wiggen, either. But they do write magazine stories about him, press lucrative endorsement offers on him, ask him to appear on the talk shows. Wiggen is to the fictional Mammoths what Tom Seaver is to the real-life Mets-an ace pitcher with all the right media moves who spends much of his time peddling insurance policies indiscriminately to teammates and opponents alike. The only quirk in his character is his friendship with simple old Bruce...
...Wiggen (Michael Moriarty), realizing that a marginal player like Pearson (Robert de Niro) will be released if management gets wind of his illness, ends a spring-training holdout by accepting less money than he is worth-if the owners will agree not to cut Bruce. His efforts to keep Bruce's secret from shrewd Skipper Dutch Schnell (Vincent Gardenia), to get the rest of the club to quit ragging a man they don't know is dying, and to encourage Bruce to play above his half-empty head, form the substance of a funny, gentle and honestly sentimental...
...come to grips with it, to handle it nonchalantly, as if it were an easy popup, are shy, deeply touching and completely winning. De Niro's doomed bumpkin is wonderfully exasperating, one of the most unsympathetic characters ever to win an audience's sympathy. Moriarty's Wiggen captures a young celebrity in the moment just before his public persona has iced over his humanity. Gardenia's manager is a perfect study in confusion-the baseball man floundering in existential depths...
...definitely dominated the game--possession is the key thing in rugby, and if you have the ball all the time you're supposed to win," Wiggen said. "But we just couldn't get it together...