Word: abruptness
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...indictment last April of Cesare Bonventre, along with others suspected of involvement in the "pizza connection," probably prevented a bloody New York gang war. It also brought an abrupt end to Bonventre's rapid rise. Before the police could arrest him, he abandoned his $50,000 Ferrari and drove away into the night in a nondescript blue Buick that was registered to no one important...
...Swann's mind. A carriage ride hurtles his thoughts to a passionate tryst with Odette in the same carriage. The technique is confusing at first, since Schlondorf forswears the traditional wavering picture and weepy music school of flashback, but highly effective once the viewer becomes accustomed to the abrupt shifts from past to present...
...wife. The dominant mood of the story is foreboding, not confrontation. Arlen enlarges the narrative with flashbacks, precise observations of the Southwestern landscape, persuasively detailed descriptions of scenes from Sam's imaginary film classics. He keeps the conflict from becoming one-sided by displaying Sam's abrupt charms and convincing manifestations of primitive genius: a ruthless urge to simplify, instantaneous judgment about character, a capacity for total absorption coupled with the short attention span of a child. Sam lives, with seeming entitlement, outside the rules...
...Connor's direction sustains many of the qualities of MacLaverty's novel. An unintrusive presentation of characters and story, and a lack of bias, bring us to a similar proximity with the events. Occasionally, the abrupt switches of scene and brief flashbacks draw attention to themselves to a distracting extent. Time and the pattern of events are, perhaps inevitably, more satisfactorily handled in the novel. The music and photography complement the action seamlessly...
...flesh out the evening. A mildly humorous play, The Actor's Nightmare is based on one very clever idea that nonetheless runs out of steam very fast. The story opens in medias res when George Spelvin, played by Jeff Brooks, finds himself backstage of a theater where an abrupt stage manager informs him that the play's leading man has been injured and George must take his place. Unfortunately George doesn't even know his own name much less his lines. "Am I an actor? I thought I was an accountant," he wonders...