Word: witnesses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...writer John Hodge, producer Andrew MacDonald, and star Ewan McGregor cruised over from the U.K. and crashed onto the U.S. film scene last year with the brilliant Trainspotting, cinema got the adrenaline shot that the Pulp Fiction only purported to give. Trainspotting's startling ability to combine black humor, wit, romance, violence and pathos in a story about Scottish heroin addicts marked it as one of the best films of the year, if not the decade. The team embraced their incredibly risky subject matter with energy and vigor, and managed to make commercially palatable a screenplay that Hollywood execs would...
Fortunately, in what is a mainly predictable film, Milo Shea, as the engineer of the necessary happy ending, comes off well. Shea, on the whole, is convincing and gives a charming, fatherly portrayal of the title character. Garofalo, while retaining her characteristic snappy wit, had a certain sluggish weariness both physically (a little too prominent eye wrinkles) and in delivery. At times, she seems to be shouting her lines (even accounting for her character's abrasiveness) without much conviction. Like-wise, Sanders, while manifesting a certain irreverent charm, was more often smiling in cheerful, bovine manner than giving any punch...
...lovers, a story seemingly inspired by the case of Charles Starkweather, the 1950s spree killer. Unlike, say, Natural Born Killers, the film is less interested in violence than in the ways in which its two self-absorbed romantics fail to communicate with each other and yet somehow bond; to wit, the dialogue includes some of the drollest non sequiturs in movie history...
RETIRING. DAVID BRINKLEY, 77, TV newsman of masterly aplomb and dryly trenchant wit; ending 54 years...
...potential of human education-the idea that even a flower girl can be transformed into a lady by learning to speak and dress like one. And on this level, the play is a joy to watch, grounding the fairy tale quality of the story with gloriously Shavian wit. But as a drama of human relations, it's much more frustrating and far less palatable than many of the playwright's other works (the fourth act, when done with enough punch, is one of the most brutally painful scenes Shaw ever wrote). As a mentor figure, Henry Higgins is less like...