Word: bottomless
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EQUUS IS dangerous dramatic territory. Its harsh terrain overflows with traps--gaping, bottomless craters of existentialism, sexual repression, and religious angst--into which the ambitious but uncautious director can easily tumble, desperately waving his arms and kicking his feet in vain as he cries "Why didn't I do Guys and Dolls?" That a non-professional would dare to take on Equus is commendable; it displays courage, or at least, self-confidence. That a non-professional director can create an intelligent and profoundly affecting rendition of Equus is remarkable; it displays unique talent...
...Watching most psychotherapy in action is not all that different from watching a colostomy, or any other doctor-work; among other things, it makes for lousy dialogue, and Ordinary People is full of it, endless psychobabbled colloquys between Conrad and his psychiatrist (Jewish, of course) who smokes cigarettes, drinks bottomless cups of coffee, wears shawl-collared cardigans to the office, and agrees to be Conrad's "friend" for 50 bucks an hour. It seems as if Redford should be satirizing this too, all these people saying "Do you want to talk about it?"; satirize the dumb kid who wants...
...tuition pocket, though, is somewhat of a bottomless pit. With the number of students applying to Harvard more than six times the number needed to fill Yard beds, the University could probably double tuition fees and still produce an acceptable Class of '85. Financial decision-makers should be commended for scrupulously avoiding any temptation of that sort. Their now familiar analogy--that the pricetag for a year at Harvard is about the same as the cost of a good new car--still holds true, even as tuition inches into double figures...
...evocations of Australia and of English middle-class society in The Transit of Venus. Of Grace and Caro's Australia, Hazzard writes: "To appear without gloves, or in other ways suggest the flesh, to so much as show unguarded love, was to be pitchforked into brutish, bottomless Australia, all the way back to primitive man. Refinement was a frail construction continually dashed by waves of a raw, reminding humanity...
...time haunts the novel; it is the center of these impersonal forces, their measure. Characters swing with "the pendulum of an era," obeying some physics of oscillatory motion. But below the philosophic dimension we recognize a close attention to contemporary detail of world and cultural history. We see "brutish, bottomless" Australia during the war and after, when Caro and Grace Bell are there, existing in the unimpassioned hopelessness and nowhereness of a place where "history's shrivelled chronicle" has already "terminated in unsuccess." When their mother drowns in a bizarre boating accident, we read, "Greece fell, Crete fell, there...