Word: brio
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Levine is excellent at making Beethoven into less of a god and more of a human. He visibly and audibly revels in the symphonies, and one of the many joys of being in the concert hall rather than listening to a recording is in catching the gleeful brio Levine exudes. Sitting rather than standing at the podium (due to well-chronicled health problems over the past four years), he swivels fluidly back and forth like a six-year old left alone in a big office chair, dancing his feet across a wooden support bar like some frenetic organist pedaling...
...notion was just slightly autobiographical, the movie would be made, in a way, by the man the movie is about. The premise contained its own absurdity - nobody makes a movie without a script, a theme, a setting - but 8-1/2 was a work of great bustle and brio, built around the exhausted, passive Guido (Marcello Mastroianni). Finally, at the point of suicide, Guido has an epiphany: he will put his problems, his job, his life, all his women, into the circus of a movie, with himself as the ringmaster. (See a pictorial celebration of Federico Fellini and his movies...
Almodóvar is cherished worldwide for his movies' brio and wisdom, but the Spanish writer-director, who turned 60 in September, has been preoccupied with death and mourning in many of his prime films. He killed off important characters in the first reels of All About My Mother and Volver, then examined how the survivors coped with their loss or the urge for revenge. An underlying love for the dead or near dead stokes the main figures in Talk to Her and Volver. In each case the grieving is natural, respectful, votive. Also volcanic...
...seeming informality of a friendly fellow you would hire to entertain the tots. He'd crack venerable jokes, play with puppets, teach the occasional verity ("Don't eat just before dinner") and, at the end, get a custard pie in the face. Simple stuff, really, but delivered with a brio that kept generations of children giggling. So his death on Thursday in a Bronx hospice, at age 83 after years of declining health, had to raise a tear, and a reflective silly grin...
...sound fizzy--"nattering nabobs of negativism" was his alliterative classic--and helped Richard Nixon explain his policies. (He later explained Nixon himself in a historically rich memoir, Before the Fall.) William Safire, who died Sept. 27 at 79, was not just a fighter--he was a champ. He had brio, savvy and insight into human nature. That's why he could write novels: because he was interested in what makes humans do what they do, in motives and twists of fate and unintended consequences...