Word: balme
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They are easy on the ears, a test for the fingers and a balm for the spirit. With a little imagination and manual dexterity, electronic keyboards can make otherwise struggling players feel like pros. Not like Horowitz, exactly; more like Flash Gordon auditioning for a garage combo, or one of those zoological enigmas who made spacey sounds in the Star Wars saloon. Keyboards can reproduce instrument sounds, even sample sound effects (from a rain forest to a barking dog), and turn any tin ear into a one-man band...
...sweet the balm of history. Like its half-mad hero, Lawrence of Arabia defied the odds and won -- seven Oscars, to be exact. And like T.E. Lawrence, the Oxford-bred English lieutenant who led a Bedouin revolt against the colonial Turks, David Lean's film has grown in legend. Critics revere it as the cinema's greatest epic, and a young generation of filmmakers fondly cite its achievement and impact. "To me it is one of the most beautiful films ever made," says Martin Scorsese, whose Last Temptation of Christ was a Lawrence on the cheap. "The day before...
Ruth Brinker is grandmother incarnate, a balm of memories and sympathies. As she sits at the edge of his messy bed, the young blond man pries the lid off his dinner. An Italian omelet, roast potatoes, broccoli. The cramped hotel room actually smells of home. "Ruth," he says, "I love...
...music is a psalm and, for Philip, a therapeutic balm. In the final shot of The Singing Detective, Marlow the writer is able to walk out of the hospital in the guise of Marlow the slick detective. "He's stopped lying there moaning and suffering," Potter observes, "ready to deal with the world as a detective would -- tough-minded and able to manipulate it." In the pain- streaked world of Dennis Potter, that counts as a happy ending: hero cured, beautiful woman on his arm, and Vera Lynn warbling We'll Meet Again in the tuppenny jukebox of his soul...
...devastating appraisal of their entire season. When corps member Julie Kent, 17 and exquisite, won the ingenue role, angry charges of unfairness increased. Fraser notes that when the movie was finished and Kent's disastrous speaking voice squeaked through the land, tempers cooled. Comments Fraser: "Never underestimate the balm of sheer malice...