Word: mephistophelian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Carrey. The ghost of The Truman Show stalks EDtv, and it can't be shaken, as--guess what--Ed is chosen to be in the show. Ray gets jealous, Ray's girlfriend Shari (Jenna Elfman) gets the warms for Ed, instant celebrity makes Ed antsy, and the network's Mephistophelian boss (Rob Reiner) tries to shape the story line of his new star's life, almost as Ed Harris' TV mogul did for Carrey's Truman Burbank...
...spinning this Mephistophelian tale was Klein, the author who insisted on anonymity until he finally, clumsily, owned up after being outed in the Washington Post. Klein was unprepared for the book's success and the attendant rumpus about the author's identity. "I wrote two other books and never got American royalty checks," he says. "I was kind of agog for the first weeks after it happened. Agog, delighted, terrified...
...incurable romantic, "Ricky-Ticky-Tavy" Octavius into a singing, simpering, sentimental fool; Jack Willis, in a minor satiric role as an American industrialist buying his way into ancient English titles and estates, makes a caricature of himself with his loud, hearty declamations and zestful crudeness of manner. Geidt lacks Mephistophelian finesse as both Mendoza and Satan, but is nicely balanced by Epstein who is superb as the stiffly and stuffily pompous Ramsden/Statue. And Rowe is highly diverting as the laconic chauffeur (H)enry Straker--Shaw's representative of the ideal working-class man, contempt for the bourgeois...
...Average Joes troop home to their TV set like sheep to the slaughter (with those same emblematic '50s-family-glued-to- th e-TV shots that Stone uses in Natural Born Killers). Every TV executive is a cartoon villain, from sleazy Twenty-One producer Dan Enright to the Mephistophelian head of Geritol, the show's sponsor, to the smug network chief who sounds like Don Corleone when he tries to get Charles Van Doren to deny that the shows were fixed: "Haven't we been good to you? Haven't we treated you as part of our family...
...surely made for Bob Roberts, a right-wing minstrel running for the Senate against a liberal incumbent named Brickley Paiste (and played by Gore Vidal, whose 1960 drama, The Best Man, addressed similar campaign compromises). With the help of a Mephistophelian campaign boss (Alan Rickman) and a mostly fawning corps of TV anchors (James Spader, Peter Gallagher, Susan Sarandon, Pamela Reed), Bob will do anything to get elected. Power is something a fellow could nearly...