Word: arcs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...knee-jerk tendency at year's end is to look back and decry the 12 months at hand as the most dismal, most indicative of civilization's downward arc since, well, the 12 months before this. 1996, with enough depressing cultural offerings to warm a pessimist's heart, may not change a Scrooge's mind on this score. Perhaps 1996 will even be remembered as the year of the somewhat desperate exclamation point: That Thing You Do! Suddenly Susan! Lamar...
...battle of a simple country girl against a phalanx of church elders, the debate of passion vs. propriety, the close-ups of so many stern faces and one shining one--all this calls to mind The Passion of Joan of Arc, the 1928 silent masterpiece by another Dane, Carl Dreyer. Von Trier's film isn't in that class, but he gets points for wild ambition. Like Bess, the writer-director has undergone a conversion. His early pictures, Element of Crime and Zentropa, were wondrously busy examples of cinematic Euroflash; here he goes for sweeping visual sentiment. He wants...
...performance that makes the movie, Watson is as dominating as Falconetti was playing Joan of Arc. Watson works her eyes and lips coquettishly, tirelessly, with an ardor rarely seen since Lillian Gish and the other white roses of the silents. She goes pop-eyed with awe at her beau's manhood; every word she speaks is an open-mouthed kiss. She acts volcanically, as any heart does when it pumps with love. She is pure emotion, naked, shameless, unmediated by discretion. These aren't attitudes of passion; this is the genuine article, take it or leave it. Even with...
Most films, as they ravel their stories, narrow their focus to two or three central characters. The English Patient, though, expands its field of vision to embrace the impromptu communities around Almasy--notably Hana and her Sikh lover Kip (Naveen Andrews). They re-enact, with less melodrama, the arc of Almasy and Katharine's desperate affair. Almasy wants his love to flee in a plane; Kip sends Hana soaring on pulleys into the clerestory of the monastery chapel. Up there with the heavenly murals: Kip knows that's where this pensive angel belongs...
WASHINGTON, D.C.: Four years after Bill Clinton won the White House, only to be dashed by the public perception of his arrogance, and a year after Newt Gingrich followed a similar arc, the two men have been given a second chance at governing. But whether the two will create a bipartisan consensus or hunker down into the bitter scorched earth fight that produced gridlock and government shutdown last year remains to be seen. A bipartisan spirit will be needed to tackle the growing problems of campaign-finance reform and reforming entitlements. On the surface, leaders from both sides seem ready...