Word: aspic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Depression. The countless plots revolve around a dinner party, an exercise in social climbing rendered all the sillier when the titled English guests of honor pop off to Florida hours before the soiree. While the featherbrained, steel-hearted hostess is lamenting lost social lions and lopsided lobster aspic, she fails to see that her daughter's impending marriage is on the shoals and that her husband's shipping business, the source of all the family's careless rapture, is sinking fast...
...snake has all the lines here: "Name your poison," says Lady Sylvia to a toothsome aristocrat. Russell oils the dialogue with lots of slithery images: killer vacuum-cleaner hoses and serpentine watch hands, Snakes and Ladders gameboards and pickled earthworms in aspic. With all the dream demons and succubus seductions, the movie starts to look like a man's fearful scenario of woman's seductive power. Is Russell just kidding or deadly serious? The answer is, as always, both. His campfire tale may be more camp than fire, but it shows the cinema's last angry mannerist in good humor...
...Yiddish at appropriate moments. While she can be just as unexciting as her husband when delivering a scripted speech, she turns * spontaneous and exuberant when she breaks away from the text, bringing applause from charmed audiences. If she becomes First Lady, she is certain to break the set-in-aspic mold of Nancy Reagan. She has little tolerance for what are known as "silly wife questions," which have always pursued political spouses. When a woman reporter wanted to know, "How do Michael's shirts look so fresh at the end of the day?," she starchily replied...
...tends to favor a pointillist shimmer of color, sometimes achieved with tiny droplets of tomato sauce dotted from a knife point to rim a sauce of grass-green pureed spinach or by flecks of herbs and vegetables added to a terrine of rabbit set in a pale, jewel-like aspic. Wielding a tiny round cutter that he found in Japan, Robuchon scoops pinpoints of ivory apple and jade avocado to be tossed with lobster for an intriguing appetizer salad, and he lards snowy codfish with slivers of pink salmon before braising the combination...
That night the wake had some gaiety about it. The buffet tables were heaped with ham, turkey, macaroni casserole, tomato aspic and lasagna. David's coffin stood in the drawing room. The guests reminisced about David's brighter sides. Ethel was composed, perhaps because, as a friend says, "she believes he went right up there with his father...