Word: catnip
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Lotto's taste for allegory and emblems is catnip to art historians who go for obscurities in the text, but coming as messages across a cultural gap of nearly half a millennium, they can be maddeningly difficult to read. Portrait of a Married Couple, 1523-24, looks like an ordinary marriage portrait, painted with exquisite fluency and respect: an upper-class man with a squarish, brown-bearded face (he looks oddly like the late Gianni Versace) sitting at a table with an equally patrician woman, Venetian evidently, from the white lapdog she is holding. Her right hand rests devotedly...
...mania has now produced a spate of books--catnip for the nostalgia connoisseur and the mogul hoping to extend his franchise line and move the vintage-cartoon cassettes off the video-store shelves. Warner Books has published Chuck Reducks, the second (after Chuck Amuck) memoir of Warner Bros.' cartoon glory years by its major double-domo, Chuck Jones. Turner Publishing, literary outlet for the owner of mgm cartoons, honors animation's wildest spirit with John Canemaker's handsome Tex Avery: The MGM Years, 1942-55. It is essentially a reprint of Pierre Lambert's original, one of four French books...
Salinger's newest theory isn't original, but it's catnip to conspiracy buffs. Earlier this month he went before television cameras in France to announce that he had been given a document by an unnamed French intelligence agent offering "very, very strong proof" that TWA Flight 800 had been destroyed accidentally by a missile test-fired from a U.S. naval vessel. One problem: Salinger's "secret document" had been on the Internet for weeks and had already been picked apart in the press...
Figgis is a refusenik in every way. Even the neon glitz of his milieu, visual catnip to most directors, is muted. His Las Vegas is mostly low-wattage motel rooms and morning-after grayness. Cage, that most daring of actors, practically cha-chas through the gloom, high on the freedom that the loss of all amour propre bestows. Shue's character hasn't yet reached that heady state. She's engaged in a complex struggle between self-awareness and self-destruction. One has only the smallest hope for her. And none at all for the commercial fate of a movie...
...director, and he does a poised job of presenting a warts-and-all portrait--Mizrahi the show-off, proud of every clever phrase he coins, and Mizrahi the serious craftsman, determined to build on his considerable gifts. Show-off and craftsman have one thing in common: they're both catnip to the camera. Unzipped could be the genesis of a second line for Mizrahi...