Word: decorum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...There is a specific topic related to every occasion. Decorum and appropriateness should exist between the topic being discussed and the occasion...
Wyatt has a writer's sensibility, but Humphreys was wise to make him a lawyer. The profession symbolizes convention, respectability and decorum. Were her protagonist a writer, expectedly musing at the beach, no one would bother with him. There would be no lovely Louise, former girlfriend and wife of his ex-partner, trying to mother him back to responsibility and solvency. There would be no Billie, the child-woman who, like the dog trainer in Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, teaches new tricks...
...Duchess defies all rules of decorum to seduce the current proprietor of her household, the charming Antonio Bologna (Cullen Gerst). But her protective brothers, the Cardinal of Ancona (David Gammons), and Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria (Sean Gullette), are alert to the Duchess' behavior. They assign Bosola (Suzanne Rose), a soldier of fortune, to spy on the Duchess' activities. In the end, each participant in this affair pays the highest price for their deceitful lifestyle...
...other words, neither the actors nor Mazursky, whose gift for portraying middle-class muddles (Down and Out in Beverly Hills) is unquestioned, achieves the kind of confident relationship with their material that Goodman and Ward enjoy. Goodman is terrific in his big comic set pieces (notably a decorum- shattering rendition of Good Golly Miss Molly at a royal ball). But even in those he avoids the temptation to broad farce. He and Ward trust themselves to go for something sweeter and more wistful, the tone of the fabulist, and they sustain it with near perfect pitch...
...despite their restraint and cultivated sense of decorum, they go all out at Christmas, when Wang says the the economics lounge "looked like a discotheque...