Word: contexts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hoods, who don't quite know how to handle free love. Meanwhile, precocious Wendy Hood insists on wearing a Richard Nixon mask during foreplay with Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood). These details, however uncomfortably amusing, put the very local action of the film into a larger context. If the film's goal is to get at the depressing root behind all the ridiculous muck that clutters up their lives, then it is an unqualified success...
...poor will venture in order to escape their misery. It is difficult to determine, however, whether the book remains in America as disturbing or as graphic as the publishers in Singapore predicted. This is partly because the marketing here has involved a removal from the original cultural context, without which the story is significantly less earth-shattering...
...same name. But "Sex Without Love" is not so sophisticated cinematically as the other two films shown, and the result seems a bit more like a home video soundtracked with poetry than an actual cohesive performance. In addition, Olds' words are spoken much too solemnly for the context of the visual images and, indeed, for the message of the poem itself. With lines like "faces red as steak" and "gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice," the piece deserves a more upbeat rendition, reflective of the complexities of young love, than the priestly tone it receives...
...voice-overs themselves also sometimes make the mistake of equating randomness with profundity. In some cases Fassbinder's commentary succeeds in placing the events of the film in a broader historical context, offering statistics describing unemployment and death within 1920s Germany, or metaphors relating earlier events to the action currently taking place. In other situations, though, the statements are so unrelated to the plot that they degenerate into non sequiturs, eliciting only confused laughter from the audience. Many of Fassbinder's visual and aural techniques also fail precisely because they try so hard to be profound and meaningful...
...easier to understand Biberkopf's hallucinatory insanity, and the symbolism of his dreams, when one considers his illness in the context of the brilliance extinguished by Reinhold's murder of Mieze. In perhaps the most subtly metaphorical of the dream sequences, Biberkopf ventures into the woods where he and Mieze used to go, not far from where her body was later found. On this trip, however, with Mieze dead, all the birds are caged, captive like the canary which once lived in the lovers' apartment...