Word: clever
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...occupation, and as long as they didn't criticize the Nazis, they did so with surprising freedom. Bertrand Tavernier's Safe Conduct is an epic (almost three hours long) reconstruction of that era--comic, suspenseful, romantic. It's a richly populated movie, focusing most intently on a clever assistant director (Jacques Gamblin) who is desperately balancing the demands of career, family and Resistance activities. The film's great set piece is his sober-hilarious overnight flight to Britain on underground business, which must be completed in time for him to be on-set the next morning. It's lovely...
...configuration. The tradition-bound patriarch (Randall Duk Kim) is now the owner of a Chinatown theater, where he stages Chinese opera to sparse crowds, while his son (Jose Llana) tries to modernize the place with glitzy American-style shows. Some of Hwang's rewrite is too clever by half: midway through the evening the old man gets the show-biz bug and changes his name to Sammy Fong (a separate character in the original), while his son does a backflip and becomes the defender of tradition. Screw heads back on here...
...Leora’s stories deal with the function of art and its failure to provide meaning. The snapshot depictions of holy life that they expect will lead to epiphany ironically blind both from seeing how their own lives fit together. One of Horn’s most clever techniques is to give readers the information they need to put the narrative puzzle together in a way the characters never can. The narration, though it suggests that art can never represent life in its totality, actually becomes a vehicle for total meaning—though this is a privilege that...
...playful directing. Although he filmed in Paris alongside French New Wavers Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in the early 1960s, Donen largely ignored the experimental techniques of his European colleagues and instead channeled his skills as an MGM musicals maestro into crafting a highly stylized and clever thriller scored by Henry Mancini and interlaced with a deadpan humor and snappy script. In one scene, as Grant’s character is forced atop the roof of a Parisian American Express building where he presumably will be shot, he deadpans, “All right, but the view better...
...does, however, have some clever touches. You can search chat rooms by words being used in live discussions, not just by the name of the chat room. I like the idea but had mixed results with the searches I tried. A new MusicShare feature lets you send your buddies links to song clips right through the instant-message window. And if your dial-up connection gets dropped, a handy new Auto-Reconnect feature gets you back online in seconds...