Word: ax
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Daniel Blank is the evil alpinist, whose climbing is an ever repeated solo ascent of a mammoth phallic spire called the Devil's Needle. Goaded by a neurotic, not to say overly demonic young woman, Blank finds true fulfillment in splitting the skulls of strangers with his ice ax. The detective is Captain Edward X. Delaney, a shrewd cop with a need to bring order to the mess of life that almost matches Blank's compulsive twitches. Sanders, who has learned a lot since his 1970 The Anderson Tapes, handles ponderous scenes gracefully enough. He balances the action...
...Soviets, Jackson is not likely to be proved gullible or an easy mark. On the other hand, détente will not be achieved without taking some calculated risks on both sides. What U.S. diplomacy lacked before Kissinger was a certain creative imagination. Jackson's meat-ax approach threatens to cut off any new departures before they can be proved successful...
...skillful at striking that self-obsessed chord in all of us. But his skill, or at least his elusiveness which passes for subtlety, started to crumble with his last album, Harvest. In Journey Through the Past, it breaks down altogether; Young wields images like a lumberjack swings an ax. Any self-respecting director would have kept such nonsense out of public theaters...
...Sills moves from misery to compassion (for her successor Jane Seymour), and then on to resolute acceptance of her fate, is a memorable lesson in the essential operatic art of building toward the big moment. Though not actually shown, the execution by ax is marvelously anticipated by Sills' clutching at her neck at the final curtain. As Henry, Baritone Robert Hale, 40, is a believably gruff, gout-ridden and girl-crazy monarch, dominating the stage in a way that disguises the fact that he does not have one solo aria...
...prosperity, obsessed by its own comforts. It is difficult, however, to credit such subtleties to a director whose idea of a good visual pun is a man holding a turkey between his legs while a woman cuts the squealing bird's head off with an ax. Ferreri's other sight gags include a couple rutting around in pastry batter and a toilet exploding, inundating everyone in the vicinity with excrement. Much is alien to a sensibility like that, although little is beneath...