Word: absurdities
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Claude Lelouch's film, which relocates the French national epic in the 20th century, mostly during World War II, also has all the defects those virtues imply. It is full of absurd coincidences, broadly archetypal characters and situations (yes, a Nazi thumps out a piano concerto while a prisoner is being tortured nearby), and a sentimentality that verges at times on the woozy. It's as if the writer-director, who in certain high-toned circles will never be forgiven for making A Man and a Woman, had never heard of modernism, let alone postmodernism...
...intrinsic part of the status quo and views its apparent permanence as a reason for black people to concede defeat, passively accepting the inferior status which has been assigned to them. Hmmm...interesting concept. We don't think so! To cease resistance simply because a problem appears intractable is absurd...
...improbably happy, morally instructive ending -- 'Les Miserables' has all the old-fashioned, totally unfashionable virtues," says TIME's Richard Schickel. Claude Lelouch's film, the seventh screen adaptation of Victor Hugo's classic novel, relocates to the 20th century, mostly during World War II. "The film is full of absurd coincidences, broadly archetypal characters and situations (yes, a Nazi thumps out a piano concerto while a prisoner is being tortured nearby), and a sentimentality that verges at times on the woozy," says Schickel. "Yet, it's more sophisticated than the feelings it evokes, and infinitely more compelling than...
...notion of placing such a figure at the center of a murder story in the Paris of 1892 must have seemed both absurd and superb when writer Eric Zencey hatched it, and in his novel Panama (Farrar Straus Giroux; 375 pages; $24), that's exactly the way it turns out. Zencey, a professor of history at Goddard College in Vermont, presents an Adams pastiche that might have been recognizable to the original: a small, acute, conflicted man who emits pedantry when made nervous. He cannot praise except in negatives: on the rococo facade of the Paris Opera House "the winged...
...Orchard and Uncle Vanya and sometime after he had established himself as a brilliant story writer for magazines, he wrote a few short comic pieces for the stage. He called them "vaudevilles," though none actually incorporated musical theater. Their designation rested on their qualification as grotesque caricatures of the absurd...