Word: avatar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...given name of George because he shared it with both a pathetic father and the self-styled musical genius who became his mother's lover. An eccentric who attributed ill health and body odor to cotton and linen clothing and advocated a wardrobe of unbleached woolen garments. A purported avatar of women's liberation who called himself a "philanderer" and preferred married women for romance. A lectern-thumping socialist who prided himself on his aristocratic if fallen lineage and chronicled protest rallies from the sidelines with amused disdain. A novelist whose books were rejected as unpublishable, a pamphleteer who seemed...
...young Katharine Hepburn but with a voracious libido. And behind them both stands another more portly silhouette: the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock. Dan is the basic Hitchcock protagonist, a fairly decent man in a horribly compromised position. And at first glance, Alex, with her cool allure, seems an avatar of Hitchcock's blond ice goddesses. Only later do we discover she is as lonely and lethal as Mother Bates. But with a difference. In Psycho the woman with the knife was really a man with an Oedipus complex. In Fatal Attraction, Alex holds...
...order to reveal several others (beauty is the beast; the good die young). Anna Hamilton Phelan's script neither sidesteps nor wallows in these homilies; it is notable mostly for the bathetic excesses it avoids. So is Peter Bogdanovich's directorial touch. Bogdanovich may be the last and finest avatar of the classic Hollywood style; discreet tracking shots, invisible editing, no camerabatics, no teary close- ups for emotional blackmail. Nobody is trying to make a masterpiece here. Mask has a sturdy, disposable feel to it, like the tissues moviegoers are advised to bring with them when they...
...Oriental exoticism. He reveals his anti-aesthetic bias against the French Romantics, toward whom his brilliant criticism is considerably less kind. He denounces their tendency toward "formal creation." The chapter, "An Extended Orient: Exoticism" criticizes at length the borrowing of imagery by the French as sheer indulgence. Gautier's Avatar is dismissed as the work of an exploitive dilettante with a "strikingly apparent gift for painting generalized pictures." Similarly, Hugo's Orientales is dismissed as "meager picturesque Orient imposed upon Montparnasse landscape...
...against an evil imperial foe and uses wit, grit and brute force to win the day and make people feel good about their country. This fantasy of an all-righteous America fills movie theaters even as it fuels presidential elections. Who is Indiana Jones if not the movie-serial avatar of White House Reagan, leaping up from near fatal assaults with a wave and a joke? Who is Superman if not the Krypton Gipper, fighting for truth, justice and voluntary school prayer? At the end of a campaign year that played like one long half-time pageant, two entertaining movies...