Word: zack
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Late one afternoon, as the spawning crabs are returning to the water, Zack Gandy and a redheaded pal pace the beach, looking for late departers. Zack, a ten-year-old imp with a Mohawk haircut, sits in the sand poking at a live crab with a stick. "I like watching how they mate," he says, launching into a kid's version of the birds and the bees on the beach. "He climbs up on her back, holds on to her tail, puts his claws under her shell and just mates. That's all I know...
Sometimes the boys intervene. They comb the beach looking for a female, and once they find one, they pull an unattached male from the water and place him atop the female. Explains Zack: "If he goes off, just push him back on and say, 'Mate!' Then they'll do it." Easy -- but then it should be, after 200 million years...
Alnilam's protagonist is Frank Cahill, an Atlanta amusement-park and swimming-pool owner who has recently been blinded by diabetes. He learns that his son Joel is missing and presumed dead after a military aircraft training accident in North Carolina. Cahill and his touchy German shepherd Zack travel to Peckover air base to learn more, even though father has never laid eyes on son. Cahill had been abandoned by his wife shortly before Joel was born, 19 years earlier...
...these pictures tell a story? Yes, a little one, about Jack and Zack (Waits) and the chatty Italian murderer (Roberto Benigni) they meet in prison. Planning their escape or simply getting to tolerate each other, they are three shaggy humans looking for a way out, and they communicate their anxiety through a kind of existential slapstick: Godot meets the Three Stooges. If you can get into the rhythms of Waits' disk-jockey patter, Benigni's fractured English and Lurie's sullen explosions, you may find Down by Law mildly ingratiating. Otherwise you will sympathize with the jailbirds as they mark...
John Lurie is back from Paradise as the lowgrade lowlife Jack, a man so cool he is almost dead. Singer Tom Waites gives an outstanding film debut as the alcoholic Zack, a washed out Wolfman Jack with a Valium temperment. Robertc Benigni starts out as a Chico Marx knock-off with a fondness for "famous American poet Bob Frost," but his character grows into the most capable and sympathetic of the trio, winning the hearts of both the audience and the beautiful Nicoletta (Nicoletta Braschi...