Word: ned
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...hero of Author Larry Woiwode's third novel is Ned O'Rourke, an aging actor who has spent twelve years playing a lovable, Bible-quoting old coot named Poppa John on a TV soap opera. For reasons not entirely clear, the producers have killed off Poppa John, the show's most popular character. It is now the Christmas season, and Ned, despite all those years of six-figure salaries, is suddenly worried about how to scratch together $200 for the January rent on his Manhattan apartment. He has become too famous as Poppa John to get other...
Those who believe that will fall for anything. Television endlessly recycles the celebrity it bestows; if Dallas' J.R. had been fatally shot, Larry Hagman would not, like Ned, be padding about in fraying tennis shoes, looking for work. Yet the implausibility of Woiwode's premise would hardly matter if he had made the unlikely seem inevitable. Instead, he channels his energies into sour asides on the state of modern urban life and spasms of empurpled prose: "The drink was gone. The last of it was going in a crawling sear down his esophagus, and then it struck...
...them have good parts to chew on." Body Heat is full of meaty characters and pungent performances-Ted Danson as a tap-dancing prosecutor, J.A. Preston as a dogged detective, and especially Mickey Rourke as a savvy young ex-con who looks and acts as if he could be Ned's sleazier twin brother. Kathleen Turner's Matty mixes come-hither looks with a sultry, baritone voice. This is a creature of fire and ice, with no intermediate shadings of warmth or aloofness. Thanks largely to her presence, Body Heat is a film to be seen...
...hiding behind the imperatives of the thriller genre. She surely is a metaphor for the seductive, destructive power of ambition. But she is also the one figure of reckless imagination. Smoothly and confidently, she guides the taut mechanism of the movie's plot. She creates between herself and Ned a sexual attraction that erases the past and suggests terrible new options. And she knows, as a young woman whose Midwestern memories are as sordid as her Palm Beach present is posh, that she must sweat for what she wants. The film and the other characters sweat with her. Perspiration...
...scenes in Body Heat are humid and tumid enough, but they are there to serve the symmetry of Kasdan's visual and narrative design. "Ned is caught in limbo, in a dream," Kasdan, 32, told TIME. "I wanted this film to have the intricate structure of a dream, the density of a good novel, and the texture of recognizable people in extraordinary circumstances." In his first film as writer-director (he was the co-author of The Empire Strikes Back and wrote the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark), Kasdan has succeeded handsomely. There is intricacy...