Word: camera
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What does he have that separates him from the Brat Pack? He's not as lovely as Rob Lowe. He doesn't explode, on- or off-camera, as ripely as Sean Penn. "Tom is at a disadvantage," says Barry Levinson, his Rain Man director. "He's got a pretty face, so his abilities are underestimated. And he's not working a rebel image, which is associated with being a good actor." But he does have the image, in the films that made him famous, of an intense young man with a mission: the total workhorse, the ultimate party animal...
...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, and a star was born...
...Born on the Fourth of July, Cruise had no Hoffman to play actor's Ping- Pong with. In front of the camera, he was on his own. Behind it, he would be led by two Viet Nam vets, Stone and Kovic. "I chose Tom," Stone says, % "because he was the closest to Ron Kovic in spirit. I sensed that they came from the same working-class Catholic background and had a similarly troubled family history. They certainly had the same drive, the same hunger to achieve, to be the best, to prove something. Like Ron too, Tom is wound real...
...film ends with a great shot. Blaze walks out of the state house where Earl's corpse lies, and the camera ascends to take in Long's old domain. Randy Newman's poignant song Louisiana 1927 -- a cracker's lament about a devastating flood -- reaches its apogee of symphonic paranoia with the line "They're tryin' to wash us away." Just then, the camera discovers the Mississippi roaring past, washing away Earl and his wily, wild, pre-TV tradition of Southern politics. What has happened down there is that the wind has changed, and for its last three minutes Blaze...
Blinds & Shutters by Michael Cooper (Genesis/Hedley; $595). Wherever the artists or arrivistes made the scene in 1960s London, Cooper was there, camera in hand. For those craving a (costly) glimpse of the time when the Beatles and the Stones ruled the realm -- "For a few years then we were just flying," recalls one of the bit players -- comes this collection of 600 works by their court photographer...