Virtually every line of dialogue suitable for printing in this newspaper is quoted above.Kit Lively on Points in Case – Kit is one of MAD magazine's Usual Gang of Idiots, and contributes (along with strip creator Scott Nickel) the regular comic strip feature The Dork Side to MAD. ''Lakeboat'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).
It's a delicate moment, which both the older and the younger Mamets - David, Tony, and, for that matter, Dale - handle with easy grace. His words, spoken without envy or even a sense of specific insight, point to the chasm of class and generation that stretches between him and Dale. ''You got it made,'' the older man says to the younger. In one scene late in the picture, Joe and Dale are chatting about their lives. ''Lakeboat'' allows you to watch that learning take place, and it also affords a glimpse of what separates Mr. Mamet's, and their ease with his expression makes you wonder if he learned it all from them rather than vice versa. Forster, whose most memorable screen performances to date have been in Haskell Wexler's ''Medium Cool'' and Quentin Tarantino's ''Jackie Brown,'' provides a bass note of melancholy soul under the scrappy bluff of ''Lakeboat.'' Mr. Johnston, who plays Stan, the biggest talker of them all Jack Wallace, who plays the avuncular, slightly off Fred and Robert Forster, whose character, Joe, seems both the least articulate and the most sensitive of the group.
DAMMIT DALE MOVIE
Andy Garcia has an uncredited silent cameo as a crew member who has had some mysterious trouble ashore: his scenes enact his buddies' divergent, wildly embellished accounts of what must have happened to him.īut the movie belongs to three actors less well known to film audiences: J. Denis Leary is the ship's fireman, who studies porno magazines as if they were tracts of German philosophy. The dialogue bubbles with disquisitions on women, work and booze (''It's a curse and an elevation''), with roughneck koans (''I knew a guy who ate a chair, just because nobody stopped him'') and with heated arguments about nothing, or about whether Steven Seagal is tougher (''starker'' in German-tinged Chicagoese) than Clint Eastwood or even Shirley Temple.Ĭharles Durning and George Wendt play the first mate and his assistant, men of impressive girth who also possess a curious delicacy of manner (at least for Mamet characters). Over the years the playwright's vernacular poetry has been placed in all sorts of mouths, and tethered to various big themes and important metaphors, but here it is beautifully rooted in the ordinary speech of working-class white ethnic Chicago. Mamet's characteristic idiom - the rude, sprung-rhythm wordplay, the dialogue-of-the-deaf philosophizing - so close to its real-world source. The film's chief pleasure, a considerable one, is in hearing Mr. There is not much drama in ''Lakeboat,'' which opens today at the Screening Room. The better subtitle might be: ''Where My Plays Come From, by David Mamet.'' And, of course, a writer is what he will become. On board he meets an assortment of brawny, big-talking characters, and you can see him drinking up their profane aper->us and rambling tall tales with a writer's eager attention.
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Mamet, and it concerns a young graduate student (he says he goes to school ''in Massachusetts, near Boston,'' which is widely recognized code for Harvard) who spends a season working on the Seaway Queen, a Lake Michigan freight boat. ''Lakeboat'' might have been subtitled ''How I Spent My Summer Vacation in a David Mamet Play.'' The film, directed by a Mamet mainstay, Joe Mantegna, was written by Mr.