Word: working
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...little lodge hall for women, a place where they can let their hair down while it is being put up. It was clever of him to stock Steel Magnolias with Southern belles, wicked of eye and tongue, though ultimately forgiving of heart. It was shrewd of him to work his successful off-Broadway drama around personal milestones (marriage, birth, death) that everyone shares. His characters may be exotics, but their situations are achingly familiar...
...stylized bitchiness of Harling's writing requires a stage setting. Failing that, it requires a director willing to let his actors throw good lines away or overlap them in ways that work in the movie's naturalistic context. But Herbert Ross insists on theatricality. His editing even provides awkward little pauses for the audience to fill with laughter, just as if this were still a play. As a result, some very good performers (Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, Daryl Hannah, Dolly Parton) function less as full-scale sorority sisters than as chorus members who elbow their way up front...
...Roberts as the young woman serenely accepting the risk of childbirth and Sally Field as her tightly wound mother, wanting to scream warnings at her daughter but only able to whisper despairing support for her -- right through the final coma. Their characters are fully and finely realized, and their work is supported, not subverted, by the style and mood of a film that cries more easily, and more persuasively, than it laughs...
...where the street action can run pretty heavy. Maurice Starr, 35, the drummer and producing whiz who put the Kids together in 1985, comes from neighboring Roxbury, where the streets are definitively mean. He has produced all the Kids' records, writes much of their material and commands the instrument work ("All instruments played or programmed by Maurice Starr" reads a large credit on the Hangin' Tough album). His gifts give the Kids a smooth buzz, but his ego increasingly gives them a pain...
...certain ways. There's a bizarre prejudice that exists in the New York publishing establishment that any work outside the tri-state area is being done by trained chimpanzees, that geography screens out sensibility. There's an idea that all Los Angeles writing is about the movie industry, that it's vulgar, shallow and banal...