Word: balladeer
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...February in Paris. The award reflected a retreat to the ordinary concerns of cinema. Last year's Palme d'Or winners, Missing from the U.S. and Yol from Turkey, played like news bulletins from Third World battlegrounds. This year's winner, Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, is a harshly elemental lyric about Japanese mountain folk that could have been made any time in the past three decades. Two survivors of the international film wars won special consolations, Grand Prize for Cinema Creation: France's Robert Bresson for L 'Argent, a lucid, listless...
...Beatles businessman-executive director of their management company, NEMS Enterprises, and director of Apple-but he was also part of the Beatles family. He served as best man at the Lennon-Ono wedding and rated a mention in Lennon's rocking celebration of that event, The Ballad of John and Yoko. Throughout The Love You Make, Brown studiously keeps himself in the background, while the Beatles are pushed forward into the glare of revisionist celebrity. The book is like a police lineup lit by limelight...
...greasers' turf is the north side of Tulsa: the socs occupy the south. But The Outsiders' sensibility is operatic enough to make the film into another West Side Story. From its first frames, when Stevie Wonder croons a pop ballad over images of suburban sunsets, Coppola sets the tone of poetic realism, Hollywood style. The greasers, with their sleek muscles and androgynous faces, display a leonine athleticism as they move through dusty lots or do a graceful, two-handed vault over a chain-link fence. Their camaraderie is familial, embracing, unselfconsciously homoerotic. Left to their better selves, they...
...kind, a series of longshot landscapes that dwarf the actors. But with his jeweler's eye for casting and a fond patience with his actors, he allows every performance in Tender Mercies to shine through the visual clichés like the home truth in a country ballad...
...have given themselves battlefield noise and nerve with bagpipes, making the "our song" of the regiment, the tribe, stirring up the blood. The pipes have their wild rhetoric. It may both stiffen and imprison the spirit. Sometimes people cannot escape from their songs. The Irish gift for the instant ballad that glorifies this afternoon's martyr will ruin a human heart and turn children into killers, the heroes of tomorrow's pub songs...