Word: canting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What makes Kramer stand out, even in this often heady company, is its lack of cant or trendy attitudes of any stripe. Rather than tailor his characters to represent the various party lines of present-day sexual politics, Benton allows the issues to develop freely and inferentially from the unruly passions of his story. Kramer avoids explicit feminist debates, and it does not provide heroes or villains of either sex. By such omissions, it departs dramatically from films like An Unmarried Woman and Alice, which feature warm, wholly sympathetic heroines and men who are usually either bastards or saints. Kramer...
...lately been talked to death. A viewer may approach Promises in the Dark with some wariness, therefore, because the subject of the film is a 17-year-old girl's death after a long battle with cancer. But Promises is clear, direct and honest, and free of both cant and sentimentality. It is also lively, in the exact sense of the word; the flow of intelligence and feeling between Buffy, the sick girl, and her family and friends makes her inevitable death tolerable...
...some hauteur: "To those of us who remain committed mainly to the ex ploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism." The article is, among other things, very funny, and a pure expression of Didion's contempt for cant...
...Sisters," we are treated to a choice piece of cant as Nin tells of a father who "made a ceremony of burning D.H. Lawrence's books, which betrays how far behind the times this family was in the development of the sensual life." The worship of Lawrence is also felt in the language of these stories. It imitates without flattering. The result is not even very sexy. "She lived open and sensitized to his presence" and "all other women were cancelled by her voice" are not much of a substitute for the real thing. The frustration of the "Collector" becomes...
...issue-specific advocacy group, however. It is a "political party" which relies on the same cant and rhetoric as more narrowly focused special interest groups, but proposes to represent a substantial portion of undergraduates. The CDU represents the type of power-seeking students who want power over the decisions of other students. There is nothing new about...