Word: brac
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Stevie awkwardly mingles cinematic language (flashbacks in sepia) and theatrical style (asides spoken into the camera). The core of the film - the domestic life of Stevie and her "lion aunt" - is insistently naturalistic, yet Stevie is as cluttered with brickbat metaphors as the cottage parlor is with bric-a-brac. But if the camera eye too often blinks, the film's mind and heart are humanly acute. The dialogue deftly threads domestic chitchat and Big Themes: the detachment of the artist, the terrifying uncontrollability of life. And at the film's center is the simple trust binding...
...Matisse of a languishing nude; a study by Isabel Bishop of "Two Girls," young women really, the one in the red hat looking concerned toward the one in the black hat, who is holding a letter, perhaps conveying bad news. The room is a trove of bric-a-brac: a bogus Oscar inscribed to "Ed Koch, Mayor for Life"; a trophy from the Friars Club; sheet music of an old song called "How'm I Doin'?" (Koch seems curiously remote from these toys, as he does from the bizarre Pee Wee, a giant black-and-white wooden rabbit that sits...
...designing textiles. From that domestic seclusion, the gray and long-beaked man would sally forth on small voyages of discovery: to Central Park in the snow, to Times Square (in the days before it became a rats' alley of pimps and porn), to the now disappearing bric-a-brac shops and bookstalls that used to line Fourth Avenue from the Bowery to Union Square. He spent these sojourns sorting through boxes of old embrowned photos, picking over trays of shells or handless watches, haunting the penny arcades, gazing mildly through shop windows at working girls whom he would never...
Nancy and his love of horses, Old West brica-brac, cowboy shirts and boots, anything Western. Riding is more than a hobby, far more important to Reagan than, say, golf is to Gerald Ford or running to Jimmy Carter. It answers a need that Reagan finds difficult to put into words. Says he: "I always had the biggest yen in the world to ride. I don't really know where...
...although he lost the title with the advent of martial law. Aquino relishes his freedom after years of confinement--he can hardly wait for the next CfIA colloquium or seminar or class. His office has an eerily empty quality, immaculately clean with none of the characteristic academic bric-a-brac littering his desk. His one luxury in the spartan setting is a little tea kettle. He eagerly keeps track of world events, and asks most of his visitors if they think prominent South Korean dissident Kim Dae-Jung "will swing"--a euphemism which even seeps into his speech when...