Word: cult
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...freight, sets out to make you happy and keep you dancing. Ska is the no-account stepfather of reggae, the blues-inflected Jamaican soul popularized Stateside by Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley and seen to splendid advantage in The Harder They Come, one of the best and most popular cult films of the '70s. Reggae shouldered a lot of political burden and social outrage, sometimes sounded almost introverted in its island concerns and religious visions. By contrast, ska is flat-out party music played faster than reggae and meant to be, if not frivolous, then feckless...
...later used in his novels. Zaire's Mobutu, with his brew of futurism and ancestor worship, is clearly the model for the remote leader of the Central African nation described in A Bend in the River (1979). The confused longings and demagogy of Michael de Freitas, a Trinidadian cult leader who was hanged for murder in 1975, are reflected in Guerrillas (1975). There are touches of pathos in the studiously detached account of De Freitas' career as a contemporary Emperor Jones. The problems of fitting the ritual masks of modernism over Africa's colonial scars are treated...
...large, irregular patch of canvas, covered with a silvery-pink crust of paint, sequins, confetti and dye, in whose nacreous surface also appears a slow twinkling of glitter. Entitled December 31, 1980: Brazil: Feast Day lemanjá, it refers to the goddess of salt water in the Brazilian macumba cult, whose votaries send out little silver-painted boats laden with flowers, perfumed soap and mirrors as offerings (if they sink, lemanjá has accepted the prayer). Pindell has given her own offering to this tropical Venus a mild air of reverence...
...collected perhaps his most enthusiastic reviews, notices of his career that finally acknowledge not just his comedic gifts but his stature as one of the finest film actors of his era. The film itself is drawing the kind of intense audiences that may mean it will turn into a cult object. Young people, themselves shaped by their early, total immersion in television, seem to respond powerfully to Chance, admiring the way worldly power simply seems to flow to him despite his passivity and his defects?he is both simple-minded and illiterate...
...they never take their subject with full scholarly weight. Instead, they have produced an alluring (any sense of the word will do) portrait of how creative people live, how the social world of the arts functions. Creating Vuillard-like interiors that Vuillard could not wait to paint, making a cult of Bernhardt, sailing on a pilgrimage to Norway to meet Ibsen - through myriad details a creative world comes alive...