Word: condescending
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Most movies about low-life Americana condescend to their subject with lots of sweat, foul patter, fat ladies and idiot giggling. This lurid and intermittently seductive melodrama (based on a true story) just observes Brad Sr. and his mob dispassionately, like slime mold under a microscope. They execute their robberies, and their victims, with soulless professionalism; their gangster grimaces register starkness without sexiness. Brad Jr. and his pals are hardly more exemplary. Talking tough, swigging beer, waiting for something bad to happen, they could be the Whitewood Gang in embryo...
...Halley, Jr. is superb as Jim, the runaway slave trying to raft his way into a free state. Jim's character is the only one that is developed beyond the two-dimensionality of the others. Resisting the temptation to condescend to his role or to the audience, Halley portrays a multi-faceted, complex character who is childlike and wise at once, evoking pathos without fishing for it. Were Huck as carefully developed and convincingly acted as Jim, the different episodes of the play would assume the coherence and interest that the production occasionally lacks...
...Cornfield, 1826, rely on the Claudean use of dark repoussoir trees framing a view of bright space at the center, and this can make them too charming to a modern eye. Constable himself remarked that The Cornfield "has certainly got a little more eyesalve than I usually condescend to give." But the great fact of nature, as Benjamin West had pointed out to Constable, was change. Shadows, vapors, clouds, the dewiness of grass in the morning, the dryness of leaves in the evening: nothing is fixed in a schema. Constable became convinced that he must overcome the stasis that convention...
...have to be, and some of it is not. An indication of this may now be seen at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan through June 27. The Whitney has long been conscientious about video art, showing it in regular programs through the 1970s when other museums would hardly condescend to touch it. Now the Whitney becomes the first American museum to give a retrospective show to a video artist. He is Nam June Paik, a Korean who lives in New York City...
...play ing Jews and Nazis) as his father, the movie plods along earnestly, endlessly - schmaltz in three-quarter time. Yet in its elephantine way, The Jazz Singer may attract much of the Rocky crowd, and for the same reasons. It recalls simpler days and sweeter movies; it does not condescend to its audience; it is neither angry nor esoteric. For many, this kind of movie has a certain restorative appeal. Others may find the experience like eating your mother's chicken soup when you're not sick. -By Richard Corliss