Word: climber
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Winslet's mother is a greedy social climber who revels in the obnoxious snobbery of Winslet's finance and his friends. The old-wealth aristocrats look down upon Kathy Bates, the crass, straight-shooting caricature of the nouveau riche. Of course, Cameron also makes bland references to the injustice of class oppression. Several back-to-back shots reveal that the ship's wealthy patrons are only able to enjoy its luxuries because of the sweat of the poor workers laboring below deck...
...would be, were this not the season in which the world of American entertainment became fascinated with Buddhism. Neither Seven Years nor Kundun is overtly about the faith. The first recounts the story of Pitt's character, Heinrich Harrer, a superstar mountain climber and Nazi poster boy who is humanized while tutoring the preteen Dalai Lama in Tibet in the 1940s and '50s. The second tells the remarkable tale of the Dalai Lama more or less through his own eyes, from his recognition as reincarnated Buddha of compassion at age two until his escape to India at 24. Each film...
...about the country's predominant religion. He picked up a copy of Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, an introduction to the subject, but never cracked it, preferring in the end to enter the project as ignorant as was the character he plays, Austrian mountain climber Heinrich Harrer, when he stumbled across the Tibetan border in 1944. But on a movie set stocked with actual monks working as extras, the actor picked up a thing or two. "Their idea of a civilization that rejects violence on principle--I mean, what?" he ejaculates with Jackie Gleasonesque incredulity...
...story follows the adventures of one Heinrich Harrer (Pitt), an Austrian mountain climber whose mountaineering expedition eventually takes him to the holy Tibetan city of Lhasa. The journey marks an emotional awakening for Harrer, one that culminates in his befriending the Dalai Lama, whose friendship and spiritual guidance emboldens him to return to and face tangled domestic issues at home. The relative lack of compelling ideas and characters to identify with before this enlightenment--basically, during Harrer's journey to Tibet--acts as a foil for the movie's latter, more fulfilling half...
...heart of its intricacy, the film basically follows the misfortunes of three Los Angeles cops as they trace the links among the murder of a corrupt colleague, a pioneer of sleazoid celebrity journalism (Danny DeVito, who brings huge comic relish to the role), a shadowy social climber (David Straithairn), who is enamored of underworld glamour, a call girl (an entrancing Kim Basinger) working for a service whose employees are obliged to imitate movie stars (she's the Veronica Lake look-alike), and, eventually, major players in the Los Angeles law-enforcement hierarchy...