Word: classics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Vigorous writing is concise," writes William Strunk in his classic Elements of Style. "This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short...but that every word tell." The sound bite is the ultimate in making every word tell. It is the very soul of compactness. Brevity is not enough. You need weight. Hence some sound bites qualify for greatness: F.D.R.'s "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" or Reagan's "Tear down this wall." Others--"a bridge to the 21st century"--are just short and gaseous...
...crowd can be fun, too, especially with such a classic as "Lawrence of Arabia"; the applause as the music started and as the words "and introducing Peter O'Toole" appeared on the screen; and, of course, as the end credits rolled. Applause is a must. Go see the two films that remain, and remember to applaud loudly. This is an opportunity not to be missed...
...sure beats working," he always said of acting, and these incidents convey the same message: do whatever the job requires, but don't make a big deal of doing something you're being overpaid for. This was an attitude many great male stars of Hollywood's classic age mastered. But Mitchum, achieving prominence late in that period (with his war- and bone-weary platoon leader in 1945's The Story of G.I. Joe), took self-deprecation to new levels...
That film's director, Charles Laughton, thought he was "one of the best actors in the world." Like Huston, Laughton saw beneath Mitchum's surpassing cool the heat of an often disappointed perfectionist. In his signature role, the private eye in the classic film noir Out of the Past, Mitchum grimly accepts doom as the price of sexual obsession and lights his passage to it with flaring wisecracks. "I don't want to die," his inamorata cries. "Neither do I, baby," Mitchum snaps. "But if I have to, I'm gonna die last." As inadvertent epitaphs go, it's pretty...
Even readers who tend to veer away from poetry find themselves propelled toward the work of Derek Walcott. It's not just because the West Indian Nobel laureate has the classic gift of mixing ease with eloquence and of deepening, dignifying his most private moments with the high and burnished diction of a sunlit Shakespeare. Even more, Walcott has strained and struggled all his life to match sun and rain, to marry the world of autumn leaves and opera houses that he learned to love on paper with the unrecorded "pomme-arac" and fireflies of his long-colonized islands...