Word: goodman
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Lonely (and billowy) as a cloud, Ralph Jones (John Goodman) wanders the halls of Buckingham Palace in his satin Green Bay Packers jacket. He has a problem: How can a Las Vegas lounge performer master the art of kingship after a rather silly accident has wiped out all the more logical candidates for the job? Peter O'Toole as Willingham, his private secretary, keeps humming a few bars of the right tune. But a regal song is just not one Ralph can fake...
...wrote with Roger Simon) offer their stars the kind of discombobulating contexts their well-established characters need to function funnily. But curiously enough, it is the film with the more outrageously improbable premise that works best. As the man who wouldn't be King if he could help it, Goodman redeems what might have been just another high-concept comedy for the party of humanity. Despite the fact that they are working a much more subtle idea -- an attempt to resolve a private crisis in an impersonally public place -- Midler and Allen rarely attain believability, let alone sympathy...
This is partly a matter of image. Goodman has become our designated Everyman, a Ralph Kramden for the '90s but without the splenetic splutter of Jackie Gleason's immortal creation. An intelligence, a sensitivity he can't quite articulate, just possibly a slight sadness, lurk behind Goodman's eyes, and they ground everything he does in reality. Midler, on the other hand, is our great show-biz floozy, and Allen personifies the anxious urban intellect. It is hard to insert their screen personas into the kind of normal, middle- class lives they are supposed to inhabit here. They require highly...
...Iceman Cometh No one may ever surpass Jason Robards' Hickey, the salesman who descends from periodic benders into coldly lethal nihilism, but in Chicago's Goodman Theater production of O'Neill's epic tragedy, Brian Dennehy was unforgettable too -- a big man crushed into pathos...
Gucci's new look is very much the vision of Dawn Mello, 52, who signed on as creative director last year. Formerly the president of New York City's upscale Bergdorf Goodman department store, the tall and elegant Mello set out to rebuild the image of the 68-year-old company by drawing on its successful past. "Gucci should be classic, but with an edge," she says. "It should not be boring...