Word: crudest
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...Rocky sequels have ceased to be movies in the usual sense of the word. They are now rituals, Low Masses celebrating what their star-creator assumes to be, on the basis of his past successes, the values of the least common denominator. Narrative linkage in any but the crudest form is dispensed with, and dialogue and characterizations are stripped to minimal levels. Any audience could chant the lines along with the archetypal figures on the screen, as if it were participating in a responsive reading. In any event, the point of the exercise is the traditional one: to bring...
...with a transsexual. A bridegroom-to-be strips off his clothes to reveal a diaper fetish. A sluttish young woman battles with her mother over her aspiration to become a pole dancer. Running commentary is provided by a studio audience in the heavenly tones of a Bach choir; the crudest of insults are spewed in the sweetest of sopranos. "I wish you died at birth!" a mother sings to her daughter. "I wish you died at birth!" the daughter warbles back. "At least," the host offers helpfully, "you agree on one thing...
Most movies are the crudest of transportation devices: clown cars for idiot laughter, stock cars of bloody revenge. Not often does a film truly transport viewers outside themselves--or deep inside. One such precious vehicle is Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, which has shown its class and mass appeal by winning the top prize at this year's Berlin Film Festival and by becoming, in the first 25 days of its release, the all-time top box-office hit in its native Japan. Now this delectable treat from the world's most revered master of animation (My Neighbor Totoro, Princess...
...Rosenbaum; they always have, always will. Well, I just don't believe this about the post-1945 generations of Europeans, though I suspect that's because I don't want to. But, undeniably, past European anti-Semitism has had a bitter effect on present European attitudes. Put at its crudest, most Europeans know very few Jews; they killed too many of them. In America there is a thriving community for whom the survival of Israel is a passionate commitment; in Europe there isn't. No number of school lessons or church sermons about the Holocaust can overcome that humdrum truth...
...traditional romantic ending to what has to be the crudest movie of the year, replete with white wedding dresses and cutesy music. This is a movie with a serious identity crisis: perhaps once the directors realized that it was simply too unfunny to be billed as a gross-out comedy, they played up the sentimental overtones in the hope that the movie would metamorphose into a sweet romantic comedy. Sadly, however, The Sweetest Thing ends up satisfying neither niche...