Word: smalltown
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...also represents the first big-screen flowering of the decade's dominant hip sensibility. Like Letterman with his "Small-Town News" and "Stupid Pet Tricks," Byrne is fascinated by the seemingly banal. Like Lynch's Blue Velvet, True Stories rides the subterranean currents of bizarre behavior that bubble under Smalltown, U.S.A. "It's a strange world, isn't it?" the characters in Blue Velvet keep saying. Yes, Byrne would reply, strange and wondrous...
...opens stunningly. A blue velvet curtain furls like a stage partition, and in the foreground credits emerge and fade. Bobbie Vinton's "Blue Velvet" wells up, and Lynch gives us a picket fence punctuated by fat red roses. We see random shots of Lumberton, the film's seemingly idyllic smalltown locale. Big-hearted firemen wave in slow-motion, houses and trees and citizens stand their ground. Then a middle-aged man has a seizure watering his lawn. The hose spurts above him with sexual abandon, and a mongrel dog lunges on the misdirected spray. Lynch follows this with a close...
...More smalltown life, more downhome flavor and more down and dirty in America's backwaters. North Carolina bootlegging is an intriguing subject and Garland Bunting may be one of the most fantastic Americans alive...
...openly nostalgic quest for a lost sense of German national identity within the economically less advanced East. "People in the East kept what West Germans surrendered," Gaus says. "The power to persevere grew over there, while it evaporated quickly here." Confronted with the relative backwardness of smalltown East German life, Gaus muses, "How much more German...
...same title on the Bob Newhart Show. They wanted to mold a sitcom around Dabney Coleman, who had played lecherous male chauvinists in the films Nine to Five and Tootsie. ("We loved to watch Dabney slither," says Tarses.) Along with NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff, they devised a smalltown TV personality who would sell his first-born to make it to the big time. Tartikoff calls the character "a total sleaze-bag," comparing him to Archie Bunker but without Archie's tinge of lovableness. Says Producer Dennis Klein: "The only thing civilized about Bill is that he has learned...