People Weekly, Nov 28, 1983 v20 p11(1)
The gambler: the adventure continues. (television reviews)
Review Grade: B
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1983 Kenny Rogers returns with a rollicking sequel to his popular 1980 TV Western. Rogers (whose 1978 hit song was the basis for the original movie) is good ole boy Grady Hawkes, a grizzled professional gambler. This time around he's partnered with Linda Evans, who plays a saloon performer who can sling a gun as well as sing a note. And Bruce Boxleitner is back as a farm boy who wants to follow Rogers' path into fame and riches. In this two-part miniseries, the trio inadvertently becomes involved in tracking down a gang of bad guys who rob the train on which they're riding. There's lots of shooting and brawling (and just a little loving) in this tale. Rogers is no Method actor, but in this nonsinging role he gives a nice, lived-in look to the character. And Linda Evans--who looks great in buckskins--shows that she has more range than her saintly wife role on Dynasty allows. --
People Weekly, Jan 20, 1986 25 p11(1)
Passion flower. (television reviews) Jeff Jarvis.
Review Grade: A
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1986 As hot and humid as a breathy kiss in the ear. As mysterious and inscrutable as its setting, Singapore. And as well photographed, well written, well acted, well directed and entertaining as any movie in the theaters this season. Nicol Williamson savors his evil role as a modern British colonial pirate in Asia. Barbara Hershey (soon to star in Woody Allen's next movie) is Williamson's baked Alaska daughter--hot on the outside, arctic on the inside. And Bruce (Scarecrow and Mrs. King) Boxleitner is an American banker whose ambition burns as hot as his libido. Boxleitner ends up in an affair with the married Hershey; he ends up stewed in Williamson's scummy corporate kettle; he ends up in a murder plot. I wont't tell all the story; it's better to watch than to read. But I will say that it's a joy to see a TV movie that avoids cliches in its script, camera angles, lighting and even its sound track. Here's a movie that intrigues, one so steamy it should make you sweat, sigh and stay tuned. Grade: A
--
Subject: Archives: BB Article: People Weekly, April 25, 1988 v29 n16 p13(1)
People Weekly, April 25, 1988 v29 n16 p13(1)
The Town Bully. (television program reviews) Jeff Jarvis.
Review Grade: C
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1988 THE TOWN BULLY ABC (Sun., April 24, 9 p.m. ET) If you're ever out driving and come across a sign welcoming you to Sparwood, stop and turn back. It is one sick little city. An evil bully harasses everybody in this town until they can't take it anymore and one upstanding citizen shoots him six times in the back. There are lots of witnesses, but they're all so glad to be rid of the bully that they shun the prosecutor (Bruce Boxleitner) as he tries to bring the killer to trial. I don't see the point. It's just a movie about aberrant behavior with no apparent moral or message. Grade: C-
--
Subject: Archives: BB Articles: People Weekly, Nov 20, 1989 v32 n21 p23(2)
People Weekly, Nov 20, 1989 v32 n21 p23(2)
Till We Meet Again. (television program reviews) David Hiltbrand.
Review Grade: C
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1989 TILL WE MEET AGAIN
CBS (Sun., Nov. 19, 9 P.M. ET)
Let's play a game. I'll give you some names and you tell me what kind of project we're talking. Here we go: Michael York, Bruce Boxleitner, Courteney Cox, Maxwell Caulfield, Barry Bostwick. Whoops, that last one gave it away. Yes, it's a Judith Krantz adaptation, her fourth on the network, Bostwick's third. Actually the whole cast bespeaks a pulp romance.
Till We Meet Again is the saga of the de Lancel women, followed in this lavish, gilded miniseries over two generations, two continents and two world wars. But the grand sweep of history serves only to pick up every tired cliche in its path.
Momma de Lancel (Lucy Gutteridge) runs away from a bourgeois French family to become a music hall singer. (You know it's France because the characters drift in and out of these strangled Gallic accents.) During an astoundingly bad simulation of World War I, she weds a champagne heir and diplomat (Michael York). Eventually (the mini concludes Tuesday at 8 ) he is posted to that hotbed of international diplomacy, Los Angeles.
They have two daughters. The elder (Mia Sara) becomes a movie actress and falls for a director and concentration camp victim (soap star Charles Shaughnessy). The feisty younger girl (Courteney Cox) enlists as an auxiliary pilot for the RAF in World War II. Flyboys Bostwick and Boxleitner are the loves of her life.
All five hours of this formula drama hinge on spontaneous marriage proposals and tearful reunions. There's also turgid dialogue, such as "I don't do business with Nazi collaborators. I don't do business with the man who raped my sister." Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
The plot skips along smartly, against lovely backdrops. But little of moment happens in the foreground of this predictable, straw man of a mini. Grade: C
--
Sporting Chance. (television program reviews) David Hiltbrand.
Review Grade: C
SPORTING CHANCE
CBS (Wed., June 20, 10 P.M. ET)
Bruce (Scarecrow and Mrs. King) Boxleitner stars in this failed pilot as a man standing under a dark 10-year-old cloud -- a college football point-fixing scandal. He returns to Los Angeles to try to get a job with a pro football franchise. The problem is that everyone from his past has long memories -- and good right crosses: They keep mashing his nose to a bloody pulp.
He desperately accepts a job from the players' wives to waylay the bimbo (Teri Copley) who's distracting the team's married quarterback (Thom Matthews). He's not nearly as desperate as this inconsistent, unrealistic show, though.
First of all, Boxleitner is much too chipper for a guy in his situation. Also, the comic and dramatic elements never gel, and the now familiar device of having him speak directly to the camera ("Some dump, eh," he editorializes of his new apartment. "I bet the cockroaches go out to eat") is a gratuitous gimmick.
The only good thing about this pilot is that the star quarterback has a wonderfully catchy, field-general sort of name: Hilderbrand. Grade: C- --
Subject: Archives: BB Article: People Weekly, Feb 25, 1991 v35 n7 p7(1)
People Weekly, Feb 25, 1991 v35 n7 p7(1)
Murderous Vision. (television program reviews) David Hiltbrand.
Review Grade: C
MURDEROUS VISION
USA (Wed., Feb. 20, 9 P.M. ET)
Bruce (Scarecrow and Mrs. King) Boxleitner is a detective stuck in a job in the missing-persons bureau who takes it upon himself to chase after a gruesome serial killer. The cop comes to depend on the visions of a psychic (Heartbeat's Laura Johnson).
Joseph d'Angerio and Robert Culp also appear in this thriller in which grotesque skin-stripping savagery clashes with moments of inappropriate levity. Those jolting changes of mood require Boxleitner to interrupt at times his usual light air of ambushed geniality with some intense screaming. In other words, tune in to watch him grin and overbear it. Grade: C-
--
Subject: Archives: BB Article: People Weekly, April 20, 1992 v37 n15 p18(2)
People Weekly, April 20, 1992 v37 n15 p18(2)
The Secret. (television program reviews) David Hiltbrand.
Review Grade: C
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1992 THE SECRET
CBS (Sun., April 19, 9 P.M. ET)
Kirk Douglas stars in this sluggish family melodrama as the owner of a quaint general store on Cape Cod. He dotes on his 9-year-old grandson (Jesse Tendler), but Douglas's cranberry-farming son (Bruce Boxleitner) finds the close relationship between the old man and the boy a rankling reminder of the neglect he experienced when he was growing up. The movie grinds slower and slower as plot lines about dyslexia and a local election are introduced.
Cynthia Cherbak's script is so histrionic and mawkish ("Oh, Dad, I know you'd cut off your arm for that boy. Talk to Patrick. Swallow your pride") that it makes the whole cast look fatuous. By the way, it's unlikely someone with a reading disability would be as confounded as Douglas is by Boston's mass transit system, which is color-coded. Even the most severe dyslexic can find the Red Line. Grade: C-
--
Subject: Archives: BB Article: People Weekly, April 27, 1992 v37 n16 p13(2)
People Weekly, April 27, 1992 v37 n16 p13(2)
The Babe. (movie reviews) Ralph Novak.
Review Grade: B
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1992 THE BABE
John Goodman, Kelly McGillis, Bruce Boxleitner
Cartoonishly broad, flashy, superficial and nonetheless often enjoyable, this movie biography of Babe Ruth is directed by Arthur (Love Story) Hiller. Love means never having to say you're a foul ball?
Goodman does justice to his much-larger-than-life character, despite an atrocious cosmetic job by makeup supervisor Kevin Haney; the overdark eyebrows and bags under the eyes make Goodman look like a werewolf -- or, given Goodman's girth and jolly demeanor, a werepanda. Goodman also shows not a shred of athletic ability. He learned to mimic Ruth's mincing home-run trot, but when pitching and batting he looks like just what he is, a natural right-hander who trained himself on a crash basis to play left-handed. His lurching, eyes-closed swing suggests a bullock lunging at a juicy weed. It also suggests someone who would never make contact with a major league pitch, let alone hit .393, as Ruth did in 1923.
Goodman isn't alone. None of the action sequences evoke the coiled strength, speed and precision of major league ballplayers. (No real players appear.) Boxleitner is dull as infielder "Jumping Joe" Dugan, Ruth's longtime pal and New York Yankee teammate. Equally colorless are Joe Ragno, Michael McGrady and Bernard Kates, the actors in the roles of Miller Huggins (Ruth's manager with the Yankees), Lou Gehrig (his most talented teammate) and Col. Jacob Ruppert (the Yankee owner who bought Ruth from the Red Sox in 1920).
Hiller and producer-writer John (Thunderheart) Fusco trot out all the standard Ruthian myths, including the evident apocrypha. The Babe visits a sick boy in the hospital, then fulfills his promise to hit two home runs for the boy in his next game. The Babe calls his shot in the 1932 World Series, seeming to point toward the centerfield wall just before he clouts a home run over it off Chicago Cub pitcher Guy Bush. (While the scene was in fact shot in Chicago's Wrigley Field, baseball purists will note [1] that the pitcher in reality was Charlie Root and [2] the presence on the outfield walls of the park's famed ivy, which in fact was not planted until six years after the '32 Series.) The Babe marries flashy Ziegfeld Follies girl Claire Hodgson, played at full-floozy-ahead speed by McGillis. All these set-piece incidents are run through rather dutifully. What Fusco and Hiller seem really committed to is a kind of Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster meeting of those two prominent 20th-century power hitters, the Babe and Sigmund Freud. Throughout the movie, Goodman laments his lack of family (his parents dumped him at a Baltimore boys' home when he was 8) and implicitly uses his orphan history to excuse a wanton lifestyle.
If Fusco and Goodman overdo the Babe's loutishness, Goodman never seems a mere buffoon, as William Bendix did in the feeble 1948 film about Ruth. Excesses aside, there is a kind of gross dignity to this portrait of the Babe. It's like watching the home team win, 15-13. (PG) RALPH NOVAK
-- | Los Angeles Magazine, June 1993 v38 n6 p128(2)
Great Writers Series. (Met Theater, Los Angeles, California)_(theater reviews) Dick Lochte.
Review Grade: A
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Los Angeles Magazine Inc. 1993 AN ALBUM CONTAINING 20 CDs of Sir Laurence Olivier enunciating every word of the Bible doesn't have to fall on my head for me to realize that the art of oral interpretation has of late resurfaced with a vengeance. Probably spurred on by the downturn in the economy, not to mention the failure of commercial TV to keep even the dimmest wit engaged (Seinfeld being the exception, of course), something new in entertainment has been sweeping the country: Reading. Audio books are arriving day-and-date with their published versions. The radio waves are filled with prose and poetry. And the theater--well, you're lucky to find a stage where performers aren't boldly consulting their scripts.
Producers love this reading thing. When actors share the stage with only a microphone, chair or stool and maybe a potted plant, the budget is chump change. Actors love it: Film and TV celebs who would rather dine at Sizzler than memorize a complete script can confidently stroll to center stage with text in hand. (One suspects that some of the performers who appeared here in the long run of the all-reading Love Letters had never seen a play before, much less appeared in one.) Even more important, audiences love it. I recently sampled two reading series, both of which were packed to the exits with gleeful patrons. And it was easy to see why: These were extremely entertaining productions--well conceived, well directed and joyously performed.
The Met Theater is presently in the midst of the fourth round of its Great Writers Series, a readfest begun in April 1991 by actor (The China Syndrome, L.A. Law) and director (Scar) Darrell Larson. It features an assortment of actors and/or authors meeting onstage every Tuesday night to read prose and poetry built around a theme. On June 1, for example, Dana Delany is set to read L. Frank Baum's The Cyclone, David Clennon will narrate Baum's The Rescue of the Tin Woodsman and Salman Rushdie's The Auction of the Ruby Slippers and Christine Lahti will deliver Selections from Was by Geoff Ryman. Later this month, Kim Cattrall, Maryedith Burrell and John Fleck will peruse literary works devoted to angels, while Christina Pickles and Carolyn Seymour will cover Letters and Stories of Virginia Woolf.
The evening I spent here was devoted to contemporary cowboy poetry, as interpreted by a number of familiar TV and film actors and one gen-u-ine cowboy. It turned out to be one of the most entertaining nights I've had at the theater in years. Even before the readings began, the audience was helping to set the stage. Mainly young, with Industry ties, they came sporting western garb and eager dispositions. The musicians--who had been specially assembled for this particular evening--seemed just as upbeat. And when the cast ambled onstage--with boots, 10-gallon chapeaux (not a white hat to be seen, incidentally), neckerchiefs and drawls in place--you got the feeling each of them wase as enthusiastic as the audience.
Bruce Boxleitner started the evening with a ripsnorting rhyme about a "Bear Ropin' Buckaroo" (by S. Omar Barker). He was followed by James Gammon's gruff rendition of Waddie Mitchell's "Story with a Moral." Martin Kove narrated "The Two Things in Life That I Really Love" by Gary McMahan, then made way for Lee Purcell, who poignantly presented Elizabeth Peck's "Star." Lee deBroux, the actor who thought up the night's event and who codirected it with Larson, stood and soundly delivered Wallace McRae's "Things of Intrinsic Worth." And on it went until Mayf Nutter and Vanessa Vandergriff appeared to warble a wild-and-woolly but strangely bittersweet version of Sam Shepard's "The Ballad of Pecos Bill and Slu Foot Sue," with new music by Deon Vozov.
The next act began with the unscheduled appearance of the real buckaroo, Cash Casey, who said he was in the neighborhood breaking horses in Malibu and who then broke up the house with two hilarious compositions of his own. All in all, it was a double-barrel delight. This was the second time the series has presented Old West readings, and if a raucous, cheering audience is any indication, there will be another Contemporary Cowboy Poetry night at the Met before too long. Watch for it, but don't ignore the other offerings in the present series. --
Subject: Archives: BB Article: People Weekly, Nov 1, 1993 v40 n18 p15(1)
People Weekly, Nov 1, 1993 v40 n18 p15(1)
House of Secrets. (television program reviews) Tom Gliatto.
Review Grade: D
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1993 HOUSE OF SECRETS
NBC (Nov. 1, 9 p.m. ET)
Who comes up with these vague TV titles? House of Secrets could be about incest, or it could be about the Price Waterhouse dynasty. In fact, it's a thriller about a deadly menage consisting of Melissa Gilbert, Bruce Boxleitner and Kate Vernon. Gilbert, who has a heart condition, owns a sanatorium in New Orleans; Boxleitner, her abusive husband, is determined to turn it into a casino; Vernon, a therapist and Boxleitner's mistress (also abused), draws Gilbert into a plot to bump him off. The bumping-off is achieved with poisoned lemonade and prolonged submersion in the bathtub, but his body vanishes, after which a hysterical Gilbert races about in filmy dresses like a hankie caught in a hurricane. House of Secrets is based on Celles Qui N'Etait Plus, which was previously the source for the French thriller Diabolique. At least that film had Simone Signoret at her curviest. This version is simply stupide, especially when it veers into a supernatural ending, abetted by Cicely Tyson as a voodoo woman. Grade: D
(David Hiltbrand is on vacation.)
Thank you, Pfyre!
Return to Library