Word: bric
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Life, Death, the Zeitgeist, and above all the tragic though profitable condition of being a Great Artist. It is big, and stuffed with clunky references to other Great Art, from Caravaggio to Joseph Beuys. Its imagery is callow and solemn, a Macy's parade of expressionist bric-a-brac: skulls, bullfights, crucifixes, severed heads. It includes portraits of the likes of Baudelaire, Artaud, Burroughs and other connoisseurs of crisis. It serves up, by implication, the image of Schnabel himself as a young Prince of Aquitaine, albeit a Texan one, sleepless with memory and disillusion, contemplating the wrenched spare parts...
...appalling View of the Kremlin in a Romantic Landscape, its gold onion domes and pink ramparts and red star floating on a sea like the isle of Cythera itself, framed by a "classical" Poussinesque clutter of arching trees, fallen columns and pediments and other bric-a-brac. It has the deeply sincere vulgarity of a holy card: an alliance between Alexander Gerasimov, Stalin's favorite artist, and Walt Disney...
...wastebasket collages of Picasso and Braque. It may or may not reflect the dimensionality of man's existence, the shape of our times, or the pretentiousness of slim gold-tipped cigarettes. A bauble that combines the simplicity of pet rocks with engineering savvy, the Cube gratifies our desire for bric-a-brac. In a society where even most of the poor can watch television dreams, the struggle for survival which engages most of humanity can be less squarely faced. Accordingly, boredom, especially the middle class Roman kind which languidly consumers grapes, sets...
...there usually telephones or televisions. There may be the early-morning clatter of pans from the kitchen, or the creak of old floorboards overhead. On the whole, B & Bs are not designed for families; there are often limitations on the number of guests per room, and fragile antiques and bric-a-brac do not coexist with small children. But for those who have embraced the B & B way of travel, there is no going back to hotel high-rise and motel monotony...
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...