Word: conscious
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Unfortunately, in the hip, personality conscious 80's, married couples don't get back together after they've been divorced. They go their separate and sometimes adulterous ways, as does blue-collar steel worker Harry Mackenzie (Gene Hackman) in Twice after he meets up with Audrey (Ann Margret), the new vamp/bartender in town, on the night of his fiftieth birthday. (Of all the unromantic places in which to meet up with one's future lifemate, a run-down neighborhood bar takes the cake...
ALMOST INSTANTLY and most unbelievably, Harry dispenses with family life, discarding his wife of nearly thirty years, the long-suffering and fabric-softener conscious Kate (Ellen Burstyn), and his two daughters, big-mouthed Sunny, wonderfully over-played by Amy Madigan, and big-hearted Helen, quietly gushed by Ally Sheedy. Conducting himself with all the maturity of a love-sick adolescent, Harry gurgles gleefully to his lover, "It's been so long since I had somebody I wanted to please," totally overlooking the fact that just as he utters those words, his wife stays dutifully at home, either starching the collars...
What does this self-conscious display have to do with Chekhov's The Seagull? On the whole, not much. The awkward playwright of Chekhov's script and Artistic Director Peter Sellars of the American National Theater in Washington share a bold if at times risible "search for new forms." But within the arcane visual framing, Sellars has mounted an intelligent reading by a cast notably including Colleen Dewhurst. He makes a case that the play is above all about jealousy and offers an electrifying moment near the end, when the words of the play-within-a-play suddenly take...
...1960s it was back to the future. Indeed, the future was now, and adults were encouraged to behave like children. The two strains of American design thus converged again, spectacularly, and this time the self-conscious sci-fi playfulness had a hysterical go-go edge. Just as children's toys had become plastic, throwaway items after World War II, grownups' furniture became overtly disposable. Frank Gehry's democratic cardboard-and-pressed- fiber chairs (1972) are delightful, but did anyone outside of an Antonioni film ever enjoy sitting on an inflatable plastic couch or wearing a paper dress? American designers today...
Many people have experienced the portrait's strange spell. "This contrast between the splendor of the helmet and the subdued tonality of the face makes one deeply conscious of both the tangible and intangible forces in Rembrandt's world, and of their inseparable inner relationship," Jakob Rosenberg of Harvard wrote in Rembrandt, Life and Work. "As in all his greatest works, one feels here a fusion of the real with the visionary, and this painting, through its inner glow and its deep harmonies, comes closer to the effect of music than to that of the plastic arts...