Word: cleverly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ways to tell the difference between style and flair in moviemaking: style reveals; flair displays. Style insinuates; flair asserts. Style is witty; flair is clever. Style seems simple; flair looks facile. Style is a bolt of lightning; flair is a ripple of Mylar. Style advances the story; flair replaces the story. Style connects images, scenes, moods, morals; flair offers a series of showy epiphanies. Style is a cloak for character; flair is a designer-jeans commercial. Style finds the right thing; flair uses everything. Style is the expression of the born moviemaker; flair is the product of the compulsive movie...
...certain disgruntled writer, Orlando, and half a dozen other tourists find themselves shipwrecked on the island of the Enu, a very odd little South Pacific island. The men wear nests in their hair, where clever birds roost-"feathered superegos" who do the thinking for the hominoids when problems get knotty. On the head of King IT the 42nd perches the imperial vulture. His Majesty, built like a sumo wrestler, rides in a mobile throne on the back of a 300-year-old sea turtle, painted every color of the rainbow, which carries him at a 1-m.p.h. crawl...
...spareness, the operetta rarely lags. For one, Brown has spruced-up the longer songs with clever shticks at one side of them: language-lab subtitles for a scene sung in Italian and a caricature-in-process to accompany a song about feminine perfection. For another, it's never tiresome just to stare at Martha Eddison's stylish costumes; they have a funky, continental allure rarely seen outside the pages of a fashion magazine and a few tables in the Adams House dining hall...
MCCORMMACH'S CLEVER and poignant tale of dreams silently betrayed and slain by the whims of time touches the present. Quantum physics and relativity have spawned the laser and computers that improve our lives and the bombs that menace them. And perhaps no aspect of nuclear weapons is as terrifying as their arbitrariness, their capacity to obliterate the hopes, plans, and dreams of mankind. They threaten to make the past irrelevant and the future impossible. They wobble like crockery in the clumsy hands of blind and drunken children, the bureaucracies and coteries that have so far maintained the balance...
...Levin's clever drama, things are seldom (if ever) what they seem, at least not for the first hour or so. It would be criminally unfair to those who haven't seen Deathtrap in either its play or movie form to reveal much more of the plot. Suffice it to say, reversal builds on reversal, a persistently wacky character arrives on the scene in the shape of, of all things, a Dutch psychic named Helga Tendorp, and things not only go bump in the night--they also scream and menace various characters with blunt objects...