Word: iconic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Bette Midler is not a great singer or a subtle actress or an exquisite beauty; yet she just may be a movie star. In The Rose, a highly fictionalized biography of a Janis Joplin-like rock icon, Midler can hardly be contained by a wide screen and six-track Dolby Stereo. She not only blasts out her many numbers with blistering fury, but she also attempts to strike every emotional chord known to junky movie melodrama. Even when she comes up flat, it is hard to look away. Midler does not make the mistake of begging for attention, like...
Both the honk and those extrasensory ears belong to James Brooks, and if he breaks up at his own jokes, he has a good excuse: Brooks is one of the funniest writers in television history. His offbeat humor animated The MTM Show, a TV icon; it is the moving force behind a hit from last season, Taxi; and it is now making The Associates into perhaps the brightest, if not the highest rated, sitcom of the new season. Movie audiences can also sample his wit in his first film, Starting Over, which stars Jill Clayburgh, Burt Reynolds and Candice Bergen...
...fiery dissident like Solzhenitsyn, waving a flag of traditional Christian values over the atheist Soviet state. His dissatisfaction with Soviet life comes across less as an ideological jihad than as truculent skirmishing. In some ways, it's more effective for just that reason--we know Voinovich has neither icon to worship nor axe to grind...
...strictly Italian-American practice, this business of celebrating the saints and pinning large-denomination dollar bills on the icon of the day's patron saint...
...after the Revolution, thanks to two circumstances that hold true in no modern capitalist state. Print was thinly spread among the masses, radio almost unheard of and there was no television. Moreover, most of the proletariat was not only illiterate, but steeped in the tradition of the icon. So ideological control of static visual images was necessary to the party. One might even say that the Russian avant-garde was the last group of artists to work in a society where painting and, to a lesser degree, sculpture were still dominant mediums of discourse...