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Time - Man of the Year
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Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
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1993-04-08
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REVIEWS, Page 75SHORT TAKES
CINEMA: Twentynothings in Seattle (90210)
Bridget Fonda has our favorite mouth in movies, and a
spirit to match; we'll happily watch her for the next 40 years.
Matt Dillon is perfecting a comic shagginess. Funny Jeremy
Piven steals a scene at a check-out counter. The other actors
in SINGLES are stuck with playing cliches -- twentynothings.
They mate, they muse, they inhabit soap-opera plots. Meet urban
planner Campbell Scott ("a realist slash dreamer"),
Greenpeacenik Kyra Sedgwick ("This whole decade is going to have
to be about cleaning up"), maitre d' Jim True ("I live my life
like a French movie"). Writer-director Cameron Crowe's movie
lives like too many others. Singles may aspire to be a Big Chill
from Seattle, but it is really a fizzled St. Elmo's Fire with
rowdier music.
MUSIC: Electronic Venture
Maybe this is the liberation of Suzanne Vega. Hearing
DNA's hip-hop remix of her popular tune Tom's Diner has
obviously encouraged the breathy folk singer to venture beyond
the safety of her acoustic guitar. Her latest album, 99.9 F
degrees, is a bold experiment in both verse and technology, with
Vega's haunting images now pegged to electronic percussion and
warped-sounding keyboards. Two of the more raucous songs, Rock
in This Pocket and Fat Man and Dancing Girl, are even hot enough
to hit the dance circuit. But unvarnished Vega fans need not
fret: the album still sports tunes like Blood Sings, in which
she breaks from technopop and delivers straight folk with
Dylanesque force.
TELEVISION: Top Cops
TV cop shows (fictional ones, anyway) have gone so
decisively out of fashion that THE HAT SQUAD looks downright
fresh. The new CBS series, about three brothers who wear black
fedoras as members of a police special-crimes unit, is in many
ways the most preposterous new show of the season. In last
week's premiere, the villain, a sadistic ex-con, was an
unstoppable monster straight out of Friday the 13th, and the
action scenes (including a bungee-jump knockout) made Road
Runner cartoons look realistic. Still, creator Stephen J.
Cannell (The A-Team, Hunter) has a knack for vivid characters
and punchy dialogue, and he invests the genre with the
good-vs.-evil intensity of an old-fashioned western. Also, the
hats are cool.
BOOKS: Whirling Electrons
While most readers have been looking the other way, writer
Eric Kraft has turned out a series of whiz-bang novellas about
a kid named Peter Leroy who does a lot of neat stuff, like
thinking, squidging for clams with his toes and noticing the
fantastic legs of his new science teacher, Miss Rheingold. Now
the out-of-print novellas have been published by Crown as LITTLE
FOLLIES ($22) and Peter's new adventures as WHERE DO YOU STOP?
($15). Kraft misses endless opportunities to be poisonously cute
about a smart boy who likes words (spline, ontology) and worries
about the universe being mostly empty (and since it is
expanding, every day emptier) space between whirling electrons.
His books are good, luminously intelligent fun.
THEATER: A Trip to Fanciful
Horton Foote's gifts for wood, dialogue and vignette won
screenplay Oscars for To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies
and gave Geraldine Page unforgettable moments in The Trip to
Bountiful. But his stage plays suffer from haphazard structure,
predictable plot and an inability to invest poignant incidents
with larger significance. These faults beset THE ROADS TO HOME,
which opened off-Broadway last week under the author's
direction. The cast of nine, an army on the tiny stage, seems
thin and the story wan. But Emmy winner Jean Stapleton and the
author's daughter Hallie glow as two Texas housewives, one full
of repressed fury at a hollow marriage, the other retreating
from reality into dark memories of her father's violent death.