Word: charms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...only psychological revelation in Alice Neel's painting of Roosevelt was that beneath the facade of charm was a shrewd politician with eyes as calculating and cold as a cigar-store Indian...
...charm wore off, though, when Kyle Stanley, who was playing alongside Boyle in the back court, missed a pair of free throws to end the Harvard rally...
Still, assuming there is such a creature as an objective observer of these goings-on, he or she may find a certain charm in Personal Best. Since pentathletes compete in both track and field events, Towne has a good range of athletic activity to cover in near documentary fashion. He is still pretty much in the awkward stage as a director, and there is more of this material than is good for the dramatic structure of the movie. He does effectively parallel Chris' rise from klutzy incompetence to championship caliber with her development as a woman from unformed adolescence...
...perhaps the greatest charm of the book is its subtle disingenuousness. It bridges two worlds, because no matter how great its sympathy for the era it describes, it was written today, and its sensibilities are as wise as our own. A scene in which a cadet shows off his skill with an airplane for his sweetheart from the girls' school begins with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the era, but just a few words later and Freeman is describing the nosedive with modern phallic abandon. Later on, a troubled character exclaims that not even "Professor Freud" could explain his malady...
...terribly true. What they fail to say is that unlike Caliban, Bernard is a monster of sly and surpassing charm, and, like Prospero, his magic wand is the English tongue. He ends a characteristic diatribe on the erosion of the English class structure with the observation that "soon there'll be more photographers than people to be photographed." On the effects of alimony, he reflects bitterly: "Idle men produced an age of elegance. Idle women merely multiply hairdressers...