Word: craftsmanship
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Lily Tomlin aspires to Chaplinesque heights of comic intuition and craftsmanship. As a movie performer. Tomlin has every other American comedian beat--the nebbishness of Woody Allen, the manic antics of Mel Brooks, and the shrill flightiness of Goldie Hawn cannot come close. Such comics lack Tomlin's mastery of the subtle comic flourish, the slight gesture or tiny twitch that not only reveals character but grabs the Big Laugh as well...
Sculpture restoration is delicate work: a slip of a tool can destroy craftsmanship that has survived thousands of years. Restorers at the National Museum of Reggio Calabria kept the statues for three years and cleared them of superficial dirt. But to remove encrusted sand, gravel and stones, the prizes were shipped to the Archaeological Museum in Florence. Experts there spent five years employing special scalpels, tiny hammers driven by compressed air and a new, ultrasonic cleaning technique to remove the remaining detritus. What had saved the works, besides the restorers' loving labors, was the sand into which they...
...except that they can see into the future or cause stones to rain from the sky. These protagonists are pitted against, and triumph over, the evilest of forces. King doesn't for a moment aspire to a high plane of literature, but his work does show a degree of craftsmanship. His characters, while not as clearly defined as possible, are believable, even if their settings are not, and King has the sharp visual acuity of a filmmaker as he shifts time and space to effect. His faults are few, but they're major: he is both overly cute and excessive...
Sinatra still knows how to seize the screen simply by being around and being himself. But most of those behind the screen settled for hackwork. Catechists will recall that pride is the first deadly sin. Would that Director Hutton had taken some pride in honest craftsmanship...
...craftsmanship were the LP's only virtue, it would be a superior record. But Simon has too much poetry in him to let arranging skill carry his songs alone. Offbeat, ambiguous images pop up in "That's Why God Made the Movies," "Oh, Marion" and "God Bless the Absentee," adding color to the vaguely melancholy feel of the verses. Simon has his occasional missteps--"How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns" is an awkward hook line no matter how cleverly it scans. But the album is more than redeemed by compelling lines like "Who was the witness to the dream/Who...