Word: avatar
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DANCES WITH WOLVES. If there must be a New Age western, let the Indians be the good guys. Let it be full of horizons unvexed by civilization. And let it star Kevin Costner, the '90s' avatar of Gary Cooper. Let Costner direct it too; he won't let a good old genre down...
Loyola Law School. Southern California's Frank Gehry -- whose buildings are tough, peculiar, playful and often brilliant -- became the architectural avatar of the last half of the decade. His campus for Loyola in Los Angeles (1985), a dense little complex of rough stucco and plywood and cheap steel, is a thoroughly apt, gratifyingly civilized work...
...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...