Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...promised more of the lame same. An affluent high school senior has an affair with a hooker (Rebecca de Mornay), dunks the family Porsche in Lake Michigan, turns his house into a brothel and still gets into Princeton. Sounds like the Reagan era in miniature. But there was wit in Paul Brickman's script and swank in his camera style. For Cruise, there was more. As soon as he tore into an air-guitar rendition of Bob Seger's Old Time Rock 'n' Roll, in his Oxford-cloth shirt, B.V.D.s and socks, pop magnetism burst out of its suburban shell...
Both a departure and a summing up, Keep the Change is described by McGuane as a "happy superimposition of results on intentions." Loyal readers will find themselves on familiar terrain -- the bone-dry wit, terse dialogue, lyrical descriptions of nature and hovering suggestion of violence are pure McGuane. But the measured tone and relatively upbeat ending of the book are a far cry from the pyrotechnical flash of his earlier works like The Bushwacked Piano or Ninety-Two in the Shade. Not all McGuane fans have stayed for the ride. "There are readers who abandoned me over the feeling that...
...these cliches without sneering at the genre. In telling the Hollywood side of the story, however, he is at times as snide as in his just closed satire of Iran-contra, Mastergate. But when he becomes cranky about the writer's woeful lot, the show is redeemed by the wit and humanity of David Zippel's lyrics and the zip of Cy Coleman's score, which delights in the past without sinking to pastiche except, maybe, in the close- harmony numbers of a group resembling the Modernaires...
...Mamet's wit at first appears equally prankish -- the stage is ablaze with hellfire and brimstone, aroar with howls and explosions, and the devil's chief clerk (Steve Goldstein) doggedly keeps trying to tell a "two Jews in a bar" joke -- but he has more serious matters in mind. His subject is how to live morally in this world rather than penitently in the next, and the dynamic that fascinates him is why people make excuses, time and again, rather than attempt to be better. The title character, played by Treat Williams, is the conscience-pricked but ultimately expedient movie...
...Shelton (Bull Durham) directs Blaze with plenty of pungent wit, but from a high, disinterested view. He never gets steam into the affair. Paul Newman approaches Earl from the outside too, as a growly-bear clown who doesn't realize he's King Lear. Lolita Davidovich, making the most of her first big break, plays Blaze as a sensible, loving career gal with an overripe body. But the picture is not mainly about sex or even love; it is about an aging man's loss of sexual, political and personal power...