Word: capra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There is a deeper moral embedded in Colin Powell's decision. It has to do with the sight, unexpected in politics, of a sane man being true to himself--unaffectedly displaying an integrity that has a faraway feel, like Frank Capra movies from the '30s. In the '90s politics and entertainment have completed a merger through media--an unwholesome synthesis that produces a whole circus of falsifications and unrealities, a kind of drug dream. The drug is power, that stimulant and hallucinogen. Even with the highest office in the world apparently available to him ("The first black ."), Powell remained comfortably...
Heaven lies far away, in California. It's called The Twilight of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a movie to be directed by Frank Capra. Purgatory is right at hand, in Buffalo, New York. It's where a pair of aging stage actors, George Hay (Philip Bosco) and his wife Charlotte (Carol Burnett), dream of starring in the Capra film. Instead, on this June day in 1953, they are reprising rundown performances of Cyrano and Private Lives. Payrolls are not being met, and their troupe is nearing mutiny...
...visual stylist, Chan can be brisk or suave. His 1989 Miracle (also known as The Chinese Godfather and Mr. Canton and Lady Rose), a kind of remake of Frank Capra's Lady for a Day, revels in supple tracking shots, elegant montages and a witty use of the wide screen. An American viewer may find the slapstick interludes overdone, but they are no harder to take than the scenes between dance routines in Astaire-Rogers movies. And it's in his production numbers-those double-time, intricately de-signed ballets of fists and feet-that Chan is unique, as star...
...WHEN STEVE ROSS, NEAR death with cancer, checked into a Los Angeles hospital in late 1992, he registered as George Bailey, the self-sacrificing common-man hero of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. No doubt that was how the man who masterminded the merger of Time Inc. (which owns TIME) and Warner Communications wished to be perceived. But the Steve Ross who emerges in Master of the Game (Simon & Schuster; 395 pages; $25), New Yorker staff writer Connie Bruck's intelligent and fascinating biography, is composed equally of George Bailey, Don Corleone, Felix Krull and Oskar Schindler...
...despite such fanciful touches, Capra, a master of motion within the frame, never lost touch with reality, which is sadly not the case with the stylish but bloodless Hudsucker Proxy. Most important, he and Sturges, ever the sentimental wise guy, were at heart children of the light. The Coens (Joel directs, Ethan produces and they write together, this time with Sam Raimi) are creatures of darkness. At their best (the great Miller's Crossing or the dizzy Raising Arizona) they are brilliant satirists of the national propensity for violence. But here they have deliberately cut themselves off from their best...