Shirley Valentine (film) to retain the best of Willy Russell's theatrical devices . . . while opening out the action to embrace a big-screen atmosphere. The supporting cast, particularly Bernard Hill as Collins's Neanderthal husband, is equally convincing, with only the hammy Conti (glistening teeth and appalling accent) striking a momentary false note." Among reviewers who found the film banal and hollow, Caryn James of "The New York Times" observed, "By adding all the characters and settings that Shirley only talks about on stage, the film reveals the weakness of Mr. Russell's script as surely as if a magician's clumsy assistant had pointed
Educating Eve Educating Eve Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate is a book by Geoffrey Sampson, providing arguments against Noam Chomsky's theory of a human instinct for (first) language acquisition. Sampson explains the original title of the book as a deliberate allusion to "Educating Rita" (1980), and uses the plot of that play to illustrate his argument. Sampson's book is a response to Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" specifically and Chomskyan linguistic nativism broadly. The title, "Educating Eve", was dropped after the first edition because the allusion to "Educating Rita" "was deemed unduly mysterious". The revised edition (2005) contains an additional chapter