Word: sneering
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fans might sneer at that. Oh, they enjoy the onslaught -- catching those souvenir gopher balls, urging the home team on to a nine-run rally in the last at-bat. Yet they suspect that the quality of baseball is declining and that players make too much money at a kid's game...
Oswald is made a dizzying blend of soldierly submission and insolent sneer, animal cunning and dimwit suckerdom by Alexis Arquette, a film actor (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Threesome) and sometime drag performer under the sobriquet Eva Destruction. In the most jarring scene, he is half-seduced, half-raped by David Ferrie, a fey father figure and apparent conspirator. Ferrie, whom Malkovich has said he would have liked to play if he were not directing, is a tour de force for Laurie Metcalf in a far cry from her Emmy-winning role as the title character's sister...
Carousel sentimentalizes the redemptive power of parenthood for Billy, a pettish, self-pitying idler and punk whom Hayden plays with an early-Brando sneer. Becoming a father may not make an abusive husband saintly; it often just gives him a new victim to pummel. A compelling actor, Hayden is not enough of a singer -- he loses his way rhythmically and sounds faint in the score's one modernist number, the anthemic Soliloquy ("my boy Bill"), which ends the first act. Sally Murphy is too bland to evoke sympathy as Billy's doormat of a wife...
...stars of this production are inadvertantly so. Monica Ferrell as Mina and Chris Cocks as her fiance John are so excrutiatingly bad, they are wonderful. Granted, it would be hard to overcome the handicap of their particular roles, bland characters who speak tritely at best. Yet John's sullen sneer is so completely out of place, and Mina's cooing sweetness rings false. Ferrell. only comes to life when she sheds the veneer of pure innocent for that of vampire seductress...
First, knee-jerk iconoclasm. The habit of a lifetime is hard to break. The very phrase "the President's economic plan" starts the facial nerves twitching into the formation of a cynical sneer. As proposals for reform of everything under the sun come cascading out of the Administration, the first instinct is to assume there is something wrong with each of them...