Word: abysses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...times better than that medium, with all its bad habits and commercial limitations, usually manages to do. Therefore (or so this argument unfairly implies) it is purist and precious, an ostentation of suffering, to say that the series was flawed, that it did not anguish stylishly enough before the abyss, over the race that went up the chimneys in smoke. The importance of the series was that, however imperfectly, it instructed millions, imprinting upon their memories an evil almost beyond comprehension...
...amalgam of autobiography and critique begins with a theory of literature. Happily, this soon gives way to anecdota and reminiscence. Once a fellow traveler, Cowley quickly discerned the moral abyss of Stalinism. But he refused to condemn those who remained on the barricades. In one of the most quoted valedictions of the '30s, he wrote...
Slade stops at Scottie's discovery of his emotional insulation, never digging any deeper into the roots of his fears--you know, the primal stuff. Tribute winds up pat and tidy, without plunging us into the existential abyss that can make this sort of thing a real corker. The tragedy of the American sit-com writer has turned out awfully shallow. This bathos gives Jack Lemmon his star turn: fast-food epiphany, downstage center. Neither he nor Slade really needed this--although it must be fun to break down onstage. Tribute slobbers when it ought only to quiver; the mask...
Belle de Jour. Arguably Luis Bunuel's most gripping study of eroticism, and certainly one of the old master's all-time achievements. This 1967 release documents the plunge of a stunning Catherine Deneuve into the abyss of masochism, highlighted by brilliantly filmed vignettes of surrealism and as bizarre plot twist, bringing Deneuve's wife of a Parisian physician (Jean Sorel) to the doors of a brothel for a job. Only his classic "Los Olivados" approaches the eeriness of the dream sequences in "Bell de Jour," and relative newcomers to Bunuel's work should mark down this Sunday's showing...
...doctor thought of the English language as something celestial - swirling, nebulous, with a bright density of words at the center and others flying off toward the margins of space and time. He came at last to regard the Dictionary as "a great abyss that will never cry 'Enough!' " Out of that chaos he fashioned one of the monuments of English-speaking civilization...