Word: causticity
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...rain-battered August day in Edinburgh, and inside the city's Usher Hall the conductor Gustavo Dudamel is having difficulty with the strings. It is the final rehearsal of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10, and Dudamel wants the violins to be more biting and caustic. Any successful performance of Shostakovich's 10th must reflect its historical context: Stalin's purges; some 20 million dead; a composer who lived in constant fear of the knock on the door. "Muchachos," Dudamel says, searching for the right expression. "Pop pop pop!" he says, mimicking the sound of a firing squad...
...surge of Mexican cinema; they usually cite the three amigos: Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo Del Toro. Yet Reygadas, 36, has made the biggest noise at international film festivals and among the more intellectual critics. His Japon and Battle in Heaven won praise for their filmmaking rigor, caustic view of Mexico's social ills and often frank take on sex. With his competition film Stellet Licht (Silent Light), Reygadas shocks again: this drama of a Mennonite community in northern Mexico contains no explicit hanky-panky. In its way the film is true to the severe, austere code...
...cranky grandmother keeps you in stitches even as the rest of the movie moves at a snail’s pace. From answering the door in the nude to constantly lecturing Brody on her much-anticipated death, Dukakis more than fills the role of the wise-yet-caustic matron.Despite being somewhat miscast, Ryan, Stewart, and Brody possess the acting chops to gently carry “In the Land of Women” to a possible Golden Globe pity-nomination. But Kasdan’s script gives the actors little to work with. Instead of achieving characters of depth...
...this March, most of the stories here appear for the first time in English). It was chosen as one of the 50 most important works in Hebrew by the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, and is on the Israeli high school syllabus. Keret now pens caustic satirical sketches for Israeli TV, has published a series of comic books and won Israel's equivalent of a Best Picture Oscar for Skin Deep, a movie he co-directed. He also dabbles in punditry: last summer, he wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times that suggested the Israeli public found last...
...Maureen Dowd, on the other hand, says no. In her caustic Feb. 17 column in The New York Times, written after watching Oprah, Dowd muses whether more good vibrations could remedy the serial incompetence of the Bush administration...