Word: wildering
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...razor-sharp ridicule of American pop culture, and ingenious manipulation of every tiny comic detail of insipid domestic life. Unfortunately, Shrinking Woman--in its last half hour--reneges on its tacit deal with the audience, degenerating from incisive social satire to the silly comedy-adventure shenanigans of a Gene Wilder--Richard Pryor movie. Director Joel Schumacher and scriptwriter Jane Wagner let the film slowly slide into the quicksand of banality, and they rely on the immeasurable talents of their star to keep Shrinking Woman's head above the slime...
This film's premise is simple: contrive, however flimsily, to get Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor into standard comic peril-a barroom fight, a mistaken-identity bank heist, a kangaroo court, a venal prison system, a convicts' rodeo, a speeding car-then watch them wriggle out with their resourceful wit and eloquent body language. Wilder moves with the psychotic serenity of someone who believes everything will turn out O.K.; Pryor trembles with the neurotic certainty that everything has already gone wrong. Wilder's is the fantasy of the liberal do-gooder; Pryor's is the reality...
Perhaps Pryor does too much watching: Wilder gets to do all the arabesques while his partner waits for him to fall to earth. Viewers too must stand around as Stir Crazy makes wrong turns, slogs across Saharas of unnecessary plotting, and unravels at its denouement. But that may simply make the triumph of Wilder and Pryor all the more savory. Recipe for a popular movie: take a series of stock situations, two gifted farceurs, and stir. Crazy...
DIED. Alec Wilder, 73, idiosyncratic composer who was equally adept at wistful popular songs (It's So Peaceful in the Country, I'll Be Around, While We're Young) and unfashionably melodic orchestral and chamber works, and whose 1972 book, American Popular Song, showed him to be a gifted writer as well; of lung cancer; in Gainesville...
There is good news and bad news in the MacBride recommendations. The good is that the commission members rejected the wilder extremes of the Masmoudi plan. Third World representatives went along with their Western colleagues in declaring that "censorship or arbitrary control of information should be abolished" and that "accurate, faithful and balanced reporting... necessarily involves access to unofficial as well as official sources of information." The only recorded dissent from these ringing endorsements of press freedom was that of the Soviet representative, Sergei Losev, director of TASS...