Word: conceits
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...galloping that helps Equus rise above its didactic moments. The play's conceit is to have actors playing the horses -wearing wire masks and rising majestically on similarly constructed hoof-like platform shoes. The dance-like performances (under Thea Sharrock's solid, no-nonsense direction) are both realistic and exotic, evoking the otherworldly power of the boy's obsession. The play's glibness melts before its arresting images; the climactic re-creation of the crime is a stunning coup-de-theater. This Equus is not a bad graduation present for Harry Potter - or for his grown-up audiences...
...arguably the dean of all living travel writers and certainly one of the most accomplished. In his latest, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux retraces the steps he took in his first notable travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar, published more than 30 years ago. Ghost Train's conceit is Theroux exploring not only how the places he visited back then have changed, but how he has as well. "The decision to return to any early scene in your life is dangerous but irresistible, not as a search for lost time but for the grotesquerie of what happened since...
...conceit this time is that three stars have come to Vietnam to shoot a war film called Tropic Thunder, based on a book by a fabled Vietnam vet (Nick Nolte). Each star is in a career rut: Tugg Speedman (Stiller) needs the sweet nectar of acclaim, Jeff Portnoy (Black) wants to shift from farce to drama, and Method man Lazarus (Downey) so hopes to hear critics' cheers for his role as an African-American sergeant that he has undergone a surgical procedure to darken his skin. With the film a month behind schedule after five days of shooting, the director...
...this large suburban home, the lads are forced to share a bedroom. It's the sort of improbability that is waved away in comedy plots. Or maybe it's part of the larger conceit that all narratives are simply the clothes hangers for splendid jokes, most of which are thrown on the closet floor anyway. After a lot of sparring and territory-marking, Brennan and Dale realize they're soulmates, agreeing on nearly everything including which guy they'd want to have sex with if they were a chick. (Together: "John Stamos!") Their parents are still flummoxed by the boys...
...about 70 million tons a day. The gap between the scale of the threat posed by global warming - it is potentially civilization-altering - and the solutions so far proposed - change a light bulb - are obvious and disheartening. Gore realized that back in December. "We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis," he said. "Our policies have to shift...