Word: cleverly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...16th century Japan a thief is saved from crucifixion because he looks like Lord Shingen, a clever and determined warlord who may have the strength and wit to unite a feudal nation under his banner. It is his idea to train the criminal as his double, against the day he himself is wounded or otherwise unable to inspire his troops in battle. This, in time, the kagemusha, or "shadow warrior," successfully manages. But then the dying leader conceives the notion of having his stand-in attempt a more difficult impersonation: Shingen wants the kagemusha to take over his life entirely...
...movie is witty and clever when the characters are witty and clever, and banal when they are banal. Some of the lines fizzle, the way lines fizzle in real life, and often these reveal the most about their speakers. Writers often go for laughs at the expense of their characters, and it is a measure of Sayles' compassion that he maintains little ironic distance from them. Yet the writing is not particularly economical, and the language, while sensitive and colorful and realistic, is not heightened or compressed the way great dramatic language must be. Some of the characters keep threatening...
...fail to laugh at a writer who discerns between the merely clever and the simply hilarious? A pundit who deploys verbs like "fumfering" and "obsessing," and adjectives like "guileness?" A knish of a man whose favorite characters are Tiffany and Eino Shmeederer and Sidney and Daphne Kuglemass? A clown who ridicules Plato and Kafka while laughin over the lascivious portions of Emma Bovary? Woody Allen, whose "one regret in life is that he is not someone else...
...linguinous prose of Pauline Kael, et al, and in book form his essays stand up well. They are not meant to be read all together at one sitting, but to be savored, like stuffed peppers in chili sauce. If one dare bother to complain, Allen may not be clever enough. His stories are a form of verbal slapstick; he is desperately self-conscious when he puns...
...artists and architects. Alice Aycock's drawings of imaginary cities, the current popularity of architectural drawings as art in themselves, and the revival of decorative facades in post-modern architecture are all part of a new interest in the nature of architectural forms as entities in themselves. Miss offers clever explorations of perspective and, through visual illusions, calls attention to the exact nature of ordinary forms. What her works lack is an overt sense of personal and emotional involvement on the part of the artist. If this human element were attended to, the result might then be a work which...