Word: zoot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...blacks got a brief ride on the B-movie circuit in the '70s (Shaft, Superfly), and Hispanics got short shrift, even as Mexicans were streaming into California to tend moguls' gardens and kitchens. When Latin actors did seize center screen, it was in art-house fodder like Alambrista!, Zoot Suit, El Norte and Crossover Dreams. These films meant well, but they rarely did well. They staggered under the weight of their liberal messages like a postman with the A.C.L.U. on his route. So many good intentions were riding on these films that they became morality plays, long on the uplift...
Olmos, who is 41, is getting plenty of nourishment these days. Nine years after he earned a Tony nomination and L.A. Drama Critics award for his portrayal of the streetwise El Pachuco in Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit, he is being touted for an Oscar nomination for his riveting performance in Stand and Deliver. Based on a true story, the film depicts three years in the life of a Bolivian-born math teacher named Jaime Escalante, who in 1982 helped 18 of his students at East Los Angeles' gang-ridden Garfield High pass the Educational Testing Service's advanced placement...
...most driven performer on the show, however, may be Olmos, who plays the stone-faced Lieut. Castillo. The Los Angeles-born actor won a Tony nomination in 1979 for his supporting role in the play Zoot Suit and produced and starred in the 1983 film The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. He has an unusual nonexclusive contract with the series, which enables him to do other work during the season. Yet Olmos approaches his role with almost mystical dedication. "One of the things I have found most exciting about Miami Vice is that they have allowed me to play this character...
...that these questions are treated with earnest skepticism. Plenty of careful medical and environmental studies have made it clear that suicide may well be an attractive alternative to "living" through a nuclear exchange. And yet something threatened to choke sympathy off at the throat. Were the Brown students 1980s zoot-suiters who had spoiled a serious issue with a publicity stunt, muddying the earnest reputation of Ivy League students? It is difficult not to ask the question...
...Good War" is a barrage of contrasts and images: descriptions of Los Angeles chicanos lounging on street corners in zoot suits; burn victims without skin; deferred civilians earning $200 a week in safety; infantrymen dying for $40 a month; a sign on Buchenwald's gate that identifies the death camp as zoological gardens; Operation Paper Clip, the innocuous code name for expediting U.S. citizenship for useful ex-Nazis. We are told that millions of dollars in trucks and equipment were dumped into the sea after victory, and we hear a general say that the $811 it cost to process...