Word: film
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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BATMAN. The summer's blockbuster comes to video stores this week. Finally, the handful of people who still haven't seen Batman will be able to explain its appeal to the even tinier (but discerning) group who find the film slow, murky, uninvolving and -- except for its visual grandeur, which may be lost on the small screen -- witless...
HENRY V. Kenneth Branagh, 28, is the Olivier wanna-be of the '80s. In this version, keenly faithful to the famous 1944 film, the actor-director stakes his boldest claim yet to Lord Larry's title. The elite cast -- a veritable Burke's Peerage of British acting -- makes it a royal, enjoyable feast...
...play was a swell show; it had something for everyone. The main thing preventing it from being an equally swell movie is the fact that it is a movie. A film must offer us something a little more spectacular than half a dozen white chicks sitting around talking. Accordingly, Harling's adaptation hustles them out of the beauty shop and into the life of the town. Suddenly the people they talked about so amusingly behind their backs must be met face- to-face. The conflicts and confusions that sounded so hilarious in the recounting are spread out realistically. And reality...
...film's center lies in the bond between Julia Roberts as the young woman serenely accepting the risk of childbirth and Sally Field as her tightly wound mother, wanting to scream warnings at her daughter but only able to whisper despairing support for her -- right through the final coma. Their characters are fully and finely realized, and their work is supported, not subverted, by the style and mood of a film that cries more easily, and more persuasively, than it laughs...
...days, nearly every popular movie wants to be a cartoon. For proof, check out 1989's five top hits: Batman; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Lethal Weapon 2; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; Ghostbusters II. They all aspire to the freedom of form and story that any animated film takes for granted. Problem is, real life gets in the way. Location shooting is at the whim of weather; special effects can look chintzy onscreen. And actors! They cost the moon, and their bodies aren't elastic enough to perform the comic contortions that Daffy Duck can give you with...