Word: abstract
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...reimagined Miller's domestic drama as a stylized mixture of Brecht and Euripedes. The main characters open the play by announcing they're going to perform a play for us; supertitles introduce us to "Act I," "Act 2" and even the "Intermission." The set is spare and semi-abstract: a screen door, segments of wire fence, a window floating in the night sky. Secondary characters linger offstage in full view of the audience, or gather to listen at key moments, forming an accusatory Greek chorus. Video projections and ominous, movielike underscoring help solidify the enveloping tension and sense of doom...
Paul Klee's childlike drawings and abstract paintings of colorful dots and shapes made him, without doubt, one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Underneath the vibrant, tongue-in-cheek surfaces of his work, Klee created a parallel universe, one in which he tried to capture and interpret almost every aspect of human existence, including its dark side. He once famously claimed: "I cannot be grasped in the here and now. For I reside just as much with the dead as with the unborn." While the quote might suggest he preferred to dwell in - and paint from...
...instead he painted camouflage on airplanes. But that didn't keep him from suffering the tragedies of war: his good friends and colleagues Franz Marc and August Macke died in combat. These experiences are reflected in Klee's work, although it's not always obvious at first glance. The abstract drawing After a Drawing From the Year 1919, for example, reduces an air attack on a boat to bare lines and geometrical shapes. In Klee's depictions of aerial battles, war planes look like birds, and often it's only the titles - Crashing Bird or Aerial Hunting Scene - that reveal...
...misconceptions, not everything he created carried the illusion of cheerfulness. In Marked Man, lines in the shape of a swastika stretch like scars across what resembles a child's rendering of a human face. "The more horrifying this world becomes (as it is these days) the more art becomes abstract," Klee wrote in 1914. But while he thought it necessary for an artist to distance himself from "a shattered world," he never completely withdrew into abstraction. Behind the childlike drawings, dots and shapes, he was always grappling with the issues of his time...
...could go on, but who am I kidding? Critics aren't expected to review Bond films so much as test-drive them. In that spirit, here's a quick rundown, on a scale of 0 to 10. Opening credit sequence: 5 - the usual semi-abstract woman's form, liquid and monumental. The song: 4 - Jack White and Alicia Keys duet on a power-pop number that's tenacious but not delightful. Chief villain: 6 - Amalric, who normally plays underdogs, hasn't the stature of a Dr. No or a Salamanca, but he's got the evil sneer down pat. Bond...