Word: weirdness
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...contentious couple is the creation of Associate Editor John Leo, who also wrote the main story, with assistance from Reporter-Researcher Val Castronovo. Says Leo: "I first got the idea for Ralph and Wanda during the Me decade's deluge of weird therapies and odd self-realization manuals. The couple provides a way of dealing quickly and lightly with a lot of ephemera." Ralph and Wanda made their debut in 1977, when Ralph heard of several new books about the challenge of middle age. (Stanley, the friend who, as part of his "midolescent" crisis, ran off in that episode...
...penny-ante gangsters in Mamet's American Buffalo talked of themselves as businessmen; the businessmen of Glengarry talk like gangsters. But gangsters with a weird, Damon Runyon twist. Out of the mouths of these middle-class lowlifes comes the odd flowery word used for screwball effect: "inured," "imperceptibly," "supercilious." The rest of their rhetoric is a litany of abuse, invective and those four-letter words that describe things people do every day in the privacy of their bedrooms and bathrooms. It may be that no salesman, not even these salesmen, would traffic so doggedly in obscenity...
Thriller does not have the mean, challenging immediacy or weird fervor of a rap record like White Lines (Don't Don't Do It), and it lacks most of rap's snappy, snazzy street smarts. But it is consummate contemporary rhythm and blues. Jane Fonda, one of Jackson's pals, puts it as neatly and nicely as any music critic: "Michael's got a fresh, original sound. The music is energetic, and it's sensual. You can dance to it, work out to it, make love to it, sing to it. It's hard to sit still...
...bitten viewer can contemplate this oeuvre without a degree of awe-a sensation not always identical with aesthetic pleasure. No doubt about it, Picasso painted many bad and some flatly absurd pictures at the end of his life. But the good ones are so good, and in such a weird way, that they utterly transfix the eye, while the drawings (and some of the vast outflow of etchings) possess an assurance, a sensuous ferocity that no other living artist could approach, let alone rival...
...most tolerant of mothers in a patriarchal family; and Jennie Dundas as Lilly, the half-pint-size author for whom life is just too short. These attractive actors often come close to embodying Irving's mes sage: the adhesives of blood and affection can help even a weird family stick together like Velcro. -By Richard Corliss...