Word: screening
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...They are made by hundreds of well-paid technicians in Hollywood and called Gremlins 2. The film is so much about itself that it summons up a movie critic (Entertainment Tonight's Leonard Maltin) to offer a pan of Gremlins One. Halfway through, the film breaks down, the screen goes blank, and then gremlins are seen taking over the movie house. In the lobby a mother shouts at the theater manager, "This is even worse than the last...
...year-old Beatty couldn't get you to roll over. The acting is mediocre, the plot lacking and, worst of all, you never really come to feel anything for the characters, whose personalities have more life on a piece of paper than they do on the screen...
What Murphy was looking for when he headed up-country into the wilderness of the self was not unreasonable. He needed to find a screen character that he, and the audience, could live with comfortably over the length of an entire movie. For he was essentially a sketch artist, creator on TV's Saturday Night Live of marvelous and curiously healing parodies of racial stereotypes: Tyrone Green, Velvet Jones, the glorious Buckwheat. His best early movies, 48 Hrs. and Trading Places, permitted him the freedom to do variations on these characters, but he didn't have to carry these pictures...
Judged purely by what director Walter Hill has put on the screen, Another 48 Hrs. is a movie mainly about the several pretty ways that glass shatters when bullets or bodies are propelled through it. It is also not insignificantly about boots. There are many elegant close-ups of them as their bad-dude owners go menacingly about their wicked ways. These are the only shots that have any passion invested in them. The rest of the film is all awkward maneuver, without wit or feeling. Screenwriters John Fasano, Jeb Stuart and Larry Gross labor to arrange a plausible reason...
Hollywood is holding its breath, waiting to measure the box-office potential of Warren Beatty's $30 million Dick Tracy, which opened last weekend. But the film community's anxiety has not stopped movie moguls from laying plans to bring more comic characters to the screen...