Media

...In a room ripped by machine gun fire, Vinnie guides his uncle to safety...

...But Wallach's acting is excruciating: a collection of hand-me-down Italianate gestures from a hundred other gangster movies...

...not even, as in all previous wars, a grotesque caricature of the human...

...If Pacino had managed to give this veneer of grotesque pathos a substratum of danger, his characterization might have brought the movie a sustaining charge...

...He is a hothead who must learn caution and cunning...

...Or, maybe, a mosque...

...But already many of us know that this is not right, and that part and parcel of its deep unrighteousness is its cynical and insulting attempt to make this literally awful BOOKS business into nothing more than a mini-series...

...Or a command post...

...RICHARDAL LEVA MEDIA NINTENDO FROM HELL THE GULF WAR ON THE TUBE hen I heard about the first air strikes against Baghdad, I was trying to leam how to play Dungeons and Dragons from some students of mine in the university pub (my character--try not to be surprised--is a chaotic neutral gnome thief...

...Beats me...

...But the veneer turns out to be the whole performance...

...The only times we have seen Vinnie in deadly action were when he struck without Michael's permission...

...Much of the bloodletting throughout the film is unconvincing...

...In that context, at least, he scores almost Receive 22 Issues Of AMERICA The National Catholic Weekly For As Little As $14.95 Edited by the Jesuits since 1909, [[N ~ AMERICA is a weekly journal of A/V opinion published for the thoughtful reader interested in the Catholic perspective...

...Her resistance to the implications of her own evidence--her determination to rescue from the evidence support for the ideological preconceptions with which she began--is the real story here, more exciting than "stories of domestic upheaval...

...Will there be more Godfathers...

...And the first true computergenerated coverage, to boot...

...Instead, he has the financial sharks murdered...

...Apparently the problem beat Coppola as well...

...His voice bleats...

...Quite possibly, and some of them may even be good, the way better episodes of a TV series are good: good enough only to keep us waiting for subsequent episodes, interesting fragments, not self-sustaining wholes...

...SA 1312 22 February 1991:135 as high as TV programming gum Fred Silverman...

...Missiles land in Israel and in Saudi Arabia...

...Their roles aren't adequately written and there are no opportunities for the actors...

...In him, exhaustion is engendering the yearning for redemption...

...He simply jumps to the next scene showing the pair scrambling into a getaway car...

...A Borgia woman transported to the twentieth century, she radiates more darkling power than any of the gun-toting males in the cast...

...We are not a nation of mindless stimulus-response mechanisms who can for long be mass-manipulated by the Tube, just because we know it's the Tube...

...Worse yet is the vagueness of Michael's conflict with the corporation crooks...

...Andy Garcia as Vinnie is effective in quiet moments but his explosions didn't shake me...

...This is the first true computerized war, we kept hearing in the early hours...

...It may be unfair, after all, to compare George Bush to Abraham Lincoln...

...No matter: the imagery tells us all that it's really Luke using the Force against the Deathstar...

...Catholic Politicians 9 The Health Care Crisis 9 Archbishop Romero, the U.S...

...This is, in fact, probably the most initially unpopular war in our history just because it has been so blatantly media-nice-nellied from the beginning...

...Which brings us to the other actors...

...The peace demonstrations will continue and grow--and be more and more reportedjust because it is the nature of information, even or especially at light-speed, to get out...

...My parents' generation still remembers listening to the radio on the morning of December 7, 1941...

...Coppola's direction also lags in the scenes of conversation...

...Two of the best young American actors are wasted: Bridget Fonda is vividly sexy as a reporter, a role which only exists to complicate a standoff between Garcia and two thugs...

...That's what I meant by calling the war the Nintendo from Hell...

...FRANK McCONNELL Misreadin9 the facts about families udith Stacey wants to convince us that feminism is not a movement of upper-middle-class women alone and that workingclass women, indeed, are the "genuine postmodern family pioneers...

...AMERICA AMERICA The National Catholic Weekly Subscription Dept...

...Wrongly condemned (or celebrated) as "profamily reactionaries," working-class women have shouldered the "burdens of freedom" and begun to devise "creative strategies" for dealing with the collapse of the nuclear family...

...And in a Pentagon briefing on Day Four a general admits that an "80 percent success rate" in our air strikes means that 80 percent of our planes released their bombs...

...Bill me...

...We all watched in coma-like horror, she remarks, as George Bush, Saddam Hussein, James Baker, and the rest of the band issued their TV-friendly statements in their TV-friendly suits about the impending possibility of the loathsome...

...Diane Keaton appears again as Kay and that's the problem...

...Christopher Lasch may be declining (since it is no longer possible for most husbands to support a wife who stays at home with the children), but the "postmodem," "recombinant" family that is taking its place is a more democratic institution, far more deserving of our support...

...the youngest is a drug addict and dealer who has spent a good deal of time in jail...

...Vinnie is taken into the Don's retinue on a probationary basis...

...Godfather III feels like the first unit on a new assembly line...

...P.O...

...One of these women had to cope with divorce, a rocky second marriage, and three difficult children with marital troubles of their own...

...Payment enclosed...

...It's eerie and scary...

...The enemy is a blip on a screen...

...Gluey writing, muzzy direction, and a surprising number of ineffective performances render Godfather III an unfulfilled promise...

...Somewhere on the other side of the world--but enough time zones away that the "instantaneous" reporting took on a weird, time loop unreality--real explosives were playing hell with real people...

...There's nowhere to hide, nothing to use as a shield, and on every side of Vinnie mafiosi are being perforated...

...His eyes resemble those of a whipped, pleading spaniel...

...It was quite a moment...

...His voice lacks the color and edge he gave to David Mamet's dialogue in House of Games...

...We know--God help us, but this is the cutting edge of our humanity--we know that the blips on the screen are human lives...

...Here, the financiers are simply products of the make-up and wardrobe departments: grey men in expensive suits...

...This one, through a combination of high tech and administrative manipulation of high brilliance and cynicism, seems almost to have broken the "Light Barrier," as if the information 134: Commonweal they want you to get is traveling faster than the events themselves...

...A B-movie director of the forties wouldn't have descended to such a shortcut...

...Please send me 22 issues of AMERICA at the special introductory price of $14.95...

...And yet TV coverage of the blitz, especially during the first four or five days, seemed almost ascetic in its concentration upon the intricate splendors of the murderous hardware and software we had unleashed...

...I remember nightly coverage of the Tet offensive...

...I'm not prepared to say she's an actress but I found her an endearing camera object...

...We know that Michael, having already legitimized most of his empire, wants to acquire the church business legally and cleanse it of its current administrative corruption...

...By midday on the seventeenth, in fact, so erotically triumphant were the reports of the destruction that the Pentagon itself--sole source of such information, this time around--felt constrained to issue a cautionary statement to the news anchorfolk, saying, in effect, cool it: we're kicking ass (in the president's less-than-Lincolnesque phrase), but we're not sure how much...

...To subscribe, simply fill out the coupon and return it to us along with your payment...

...On the face of it, Stacey's research does not lend much support to these cheery conclusions...

...She studied two women in Silicon Valley, their families, and their friends...

...The only reason seems to be to provide part three with the obligatory concluding blood bath...

...Rates higher for Canadian and foreign subscriptions...

...Why...

...and El Slavador ,,, Issues which, in the best of Jesuit tradition, invoke lively discourse and serious thought...

...But we were seeing the PG13 version, set up---and set up with no sense of embarrassment --by the administration for instantaneous transmission to Peter Jennings for instantaneous transmission to--well, to you...

...We'll then send you 22 weeks of our award-winning magazine for as much as 45% off the cover price...

...There are too many gaps in the story...

...Many people have said, with the unmistakable force of true witness, that this war at this time is wrong...

...But, at least up to this point, thanks to extreme inhibition of on-site reporting by qualified journalists, a massive input of optimistic noninformation by the military, and a really heroic arrogance about the passivity of the TV viewer on the part of the administration, the "human" in this whole thing has been kept to a comfortable minimum...

...The president was wiser than he knew when, a month ago, he promised that this war--he had already, of course, decided to inflict it--would not be "another Vietnam...

...Even if they do not always identify themselves as feminists, they have absorbed feminist ideas and are experimenting with "alternative models of femininity...

...The latter belongs to Sofia Coppola...

...The other endured a whole series of calamities...

...She died of cancer in her twenties...

...Soon--probably before this appears in print--the body-bags will start coming home...

...The first two Godfather movies were epic...

...To paraphrase Ed Murrow, who believed passionately in the truth of the media as a hope and in the benevolence of an informed society, we are not fools nor are we descended from foolish men...

...His performance seems to issue from that comer of the actor's talent that produces striking cartoons like his Big Boy in Dick Tracy rather than the "human" work in Dog Day Afternoon or the other Godfather films...

...Super Bowl Sunday went on as planned--Americans "need a break," and to hell with Scuds in Tel Aviv...

...To be sure, the sloppy and smelly human keeps breaking in on the bliss of the arcade game...

...John Savage wanders on and offthe set dressed in a cassock as lawyer Tom Hagen's son...

...That war, in this more than any other century, is a media event, is of course a resounding clich6: since, in this century, information travels at a normal speed of 186,000 miles per second, it's difficult to say what is not a media event...

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...senators and congressmen, and the two hundred students with whom I was arrested for civil disobedience on the night of January 15, 1991...

...It may be that his special talent and his proper arena is the world of television production...

...They include Pope John Paul II, Coretta Scott King, U.S...

...Very few of them score...

...But this war is altogether new...

...Box 77274 9 Atlanta, GA 30357-1274 [] Yes...

...But implicit in what Goodman says is something I've been saying and believing since I started writing these pieces: we are not as dumb as the TV thinks we are...

...The "diversity and the innovative character of many working-class kin relationships"-the prevalence of extended families, blended families, and single-parent households--belie the "Archie Bunker" stereotype, according to Stacey...

...The sloppy and smelly human, in fact, is likely to intrude a lot more as this adventure continues...

...The "modem" family BRAVE NEW FAMILIES Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-Century America Judith Stacey Basic Books, $22.95, 321 pp...

...How do our heroes survive...

...They may not realize it in the Pentagon, but we have come a way since the Tet offensive...

...By the end of the movie, Michael has appointed Vinnie his successor...

...This apparition works marvelously in the initial scenes to change our perception of Michael...

...Another daughter, a high school dropout, became an unwed mother at an early age, married and divorced another man who beat her (as her father had beaten her mother), and separated from her second husband--an amiable but lazy fellow (a "postfeminist man," in Stacey's euphemistic formulation) who was quite 136: Commonweal...

...Perhaps the best ingredient of parts one and two was their juicy villainy...

...A pretty face plays Michael's son and a prettier one plays his daughter...

...Their success in "actively remaking family life" should reassure those who have been taken in by the "popular lament over family decline...

...It will not be another Vietnam because we have become sophisticated enough as a nation of viewers to recognize, and even condemn, distortion and prevarication when we see it...

...Name Address City State Zip_ Offer valid for new U.S...

...As in "Centipede" or "Space Invaders," the "enemy" is not really human...

...Where are the scenes that demonstrate that the young mafioso has acquired the cool calculation of a don...

...or the ghostly track of a laser-guided rocket videotaped from the nose of a fighter, gliding with superhuman precision between the doors of a launcher...

...Here is a monster who is tired of being a monster...

...The wonderfully wise Ellen Goodman wrote, a week before the war, about the TV-style, slow-motion numbness of this whole catastrophe...

...Her eldest son died in an auto crash...

...But maybe not, one thinks and hopes, for long...

...Americans are taken prisoners of war and shown on TV (make no mistake: the Other Side is no less media-corrupt than we in all this...

...Take it from a chaotic neutral gnome thief: "No Blood for Image" is the slogan that will, on this grim path, preserve our sense and sensibility of honor...

...Her violent marriage several times approached the point of collapse until it ended, after a reconciliation, in the untimely death of her husband...

...This Michael is a near-hunchback lightly coated with white dust...

...She simply appears...

...So why doesn't Michael, who presumably has the low-down on every crook in the Western world, simply expose the fraudulence of his enemies...

...Eli Wallach as the conniving don is obviously the actor Coppola was relying on to provide the color that Lee Strasberg and others brought to the earlier films...

...Joe Mantegna brings his usual magnetic sleaziness to Zasa, but he never finds the core of the role...

...Many of the camera angles don't elucidate the dialogue, and the cutting is often furtive...

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...And if the military reporters---cancel that, let's call them what they are--if the military narrators of the war decided, around noon of the seventeenth, to ease down on the gratification lever and lean a little on the anxiety lever: well, hey, no need to be subtle about it, it's TV and people expectthe Tube to push them around...

...They can't take that away from US now...

...Finally, decisively, Pacino...

...In this picture, Michael's enemies are colorless...

...A friend rushed up, told us what was happening, and we all moved to the big TV screen next to the beer and pizza counter, abandoning our board game for what seems more and more, as day follows day, the Nintendo from Hell...

...And why complain of nepotism when Coppola's sister, Talia Shire, gives the film's best performance as Michael's sister...

...One of her three daughters attempted suicide after she discovered that her husband, a heavy drug-user, alcoholic, and parttime criminal by whom she had four children in rapid succession, was seeing another woman...

...He has lost his sense of scene-toscene rhythm, too: one long, hushed, pause-filled scene between Corleone and a cardinal is followed by another plodding, hushed, pause-filled scene between Corleone and his sister...