Word: film
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Such a one is the film under consideration -- a Mafia comedy. Already the mind contracts with diminished expectations! Non-Italian actors gesturing rambunctiously, speaking with cotton candy in their mouths, plotting elaborate revenge with dim-bulbed resources. Cast Peter Falk as Dino Capisco, a dapper ) don just sprung from Sing Sing. Give him a score to settle with his weaselly partner Carmine Tarantino (Michael V. Gazzo) and a slick, Rudolph Giuliani- style D.A. (Bob Gunton) with an eye to nailing Dino's hide on the front page. Saddle him with a dog-stealing wife (Brenda Vaccaro) and a devoted...
...adapter Earl Mac Rauch (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai) knows that the only way to pin Belushi and Hollywood is to wax satiric and surrealistic. When the dead Belushi prowls his old haunts in a morgue sheet that looks like a toga out of the Animal House closet, the film almost has style to match its guts. So does Chiklis' boldly percussive performance. But Wired's take on Belushi is so lame and gross that it validates the verdict of a cop in the movie: "He's just another fat junkie who went belly...
Willwerth became a lover of wildlife when he watched a Walt Disney film about South America's big jungle cats at the local movie house in his hometown of Grand Rapids. Since then he has visited the Tiger Tops resort, in Nepal's Royal Chitwan National Park, and game preserves in East Africa as well as the penguin protectorates located on the South Australian coast. "This assignment brought out both the conservationist and the kid in me," he says...
Their annual spawning is a sight so bizarre that it draws voyeurs from distant lands to the sandy shores some twelve miles northwest of Cape May, N.J. Lugging cameras, British journalists fly here to film the fecund scene. Japanese scientists gawk at the colossal display of concupiscence. American entrepreneurs profit from it. Biologists study it, and schoolchildren puzzle over it. Oblivious, the crabs just do their primal thing...
...still the movie does not work. Its true story is too singular to serve as the basis for moral generalizations. The ideas advanced by the film are, in any case, not significantly different from the ones put forward by opponents of the war while it was going on. But it is its distant and curiously monotonous tone that finally betrays Casualties of War. It numbs the conscience instead of awakening...