Word: showmanship
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...cover the all treatment they needed. When their request to receive treatment at the base is denied, they go to Havana, where their ailments are efficiently cared for. (Cuba, whatever its other troubles, is widely recognized as having first-class health care.) Is this showboating, or just showmanship? Either way, the polemicist makes his point in a film that's angry and one-sided, sure, but also instructive and often so funny you may pop a stitch watching...
...inequities and iniquities. He's never the first to address a gut issue, whether it's corporate greed (Roger & Me), American violence (Bowling for Columbine), the politics of terror (Fahrenheit 9/11). But he's the one who does it the noisiest, with the highest entertainment value, mixing muckraking with showmanship, Ida Tarbell with P.T. Barnum. His new movie - which has its world premiere tonight in Cannes, and opens in North America June 29th - fits honorably in that tradition. As both harangue and movie tragicomedy, Sicko is socko...
...last great performance - certainly her most startling and touching - was the Osborne interview for TCM. I'm told that the show, which lasts 56 mins. including clips, took four days to shoot because Betty's anxieties kept getting in the way of her showmanship. But still she's a wonder: her vitality undiminshed, she jumps up and down in her chair, rising with some memories, falling back crushed with others. At one point she gets up and hugs the genial Osborne in thanks for his kindness...
...Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith, the film is less a serial-killer thriller than an All the President's Men wannabe, with the young Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) as Woodward and Bernstein, and his senior colleague Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) as a crusty Ben Bradlee type with a lot more showmanship and a mile-wide self-destructive streak. Their sleuthing sometimes helps, mostly annoys detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards). When Toschi is asked, "Have you considered that the killer might be Paul Avery?", he deadpans, "Frequently...
...that dessert yesterday. The man who had feigned heart attacks countless times on stage died of congestive heart failure, with no resurrection in sight. But the lurid showmanship he brought to pop culture will never die. His last words, apparently, were ?I?m going away tonight.? Considering his impact, they might have been ?I feel good...