Word: spielbergian
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...most genteel patrons? Bob Balaban's recent comedy Parents, a kind of robin's-egg Blue Velvet, limned a '50s family, as placid and telegenic as the Andersons on Father Knows Best, that devours human flesh. Now Middle America gets a return visit from Joe Dante, guerrilla terrorist in Spielbergian suburbia. His Gremlins was a comic nightmare in which midget monsters invade a wonderful-life town and act up like the Hell's Angels in a malt shop. In The 'Burbs, the gremlins are the townspeople themselves, driven to posse paranoia by their suspicions about people whose only...
...tenure as artistic director with productions of three of Shakespeare's final plays, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest and Cymbeline. The plays, which Hall sees as Shakespeare's collective valedictory, are performed on much the same set by the same actors. The high point is Cymbeline, with its Spielbergian supernatural touches (ghosts appearing in dreams, Jupiter descending from the heavens) and robust battles. In one chilling scene, two panels of the back wall bang open to reveal opposing armies about to pour onto the stage. The most impressive coup de theatre, however, belongs to Star Tim Pigott-Smith...
...only so many stories. Some people say there are only two stories, 'Jack and the Bean-stalk' and 'Cinderella."' Which kind does the blockbuster filmmaker and Academy Award winner favor? "Stories that don't cost a lot of money to do." In the trillion-dollar age of the imperial Spielbergian director, it's understandable why Avildsen remains one of the business's favorite practitioners...
...severs her ties with Mister, calling him a creep and setting off with Shug to build a new life. For these few minutes, Spielberg achieves the mix of realism and spiritual triumph that elsewhere evades him. The movie ends with a reunion scene between Celie and Nettie, an obvious Spielbergian tear-jerker that would have been pardonable had the rest of the movie followed a different course...
Given Hollywood's current taste for Spielbergian light-and magic shows, an "actor's movie" is a dying breed. But in Kiss of the Spider Woman, a film mixing the dangerous ingredients of politics and movie glamour itself, the actors' contributions are paramount...