Word: capra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this week with the GOP straw poll in Ames, which coincides with the state fair in Des Moines. Journalists will describe the luscious pork chops and the cow sculpted from butter. Meanwhile, the Iowa GOP will pocket about $1 million for party-building expenses. The straw poll is Frank Capra only on the surface. At heart, it's the party's No.1 fund raiser...
...That verdict was premature, but people believed it because they so desperately wanted to. Besides, Ford looked like an honest, decent man, and that, as people who knew him readily attested, is exactly what he was. Frank Capra might have made a movie of Ford's wholesome life to date, although perhaps without the improbable fade-out in the Oval Office...
...Altman certainly didn't invent overlapping dialogue; that goes back to the earliest days of talking pictures, when such directors as Frank Capra, Howard Hawks and Lewis Milestone picked up the technique popularized a few years earlier in the stage production of The Front Page. But he practically trademarked it in MASH. And he kept using it as a way of suggesting that life wasn't as neat as most movie stories. It was a messy thing - chaos, only vaguely organized - and it offered few straightforward resolutions or consolations. To the movie moguls, that was a call to anarchy...
...SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON FRANK CAPRA...
Appointed to fill out a Senate term because the state bosses think he's naive and malleable, Jefferson Smith eventually stages a one-man filibuster to get his message out beyond the corrupt lawmakers and to the electorate. Capra-corn was never so spicy or savory as in this angry, impassioned political weepie. James Stewart, below, expertly plays every emotional key, from innocence to hysteria to exhaustion...