Word: diva
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Diva...
Every opera fan knows how high Tosca bounced, when the next swan left and what Maria Callas thought of Renata Tebaldi; disasters, bons mots and bitchy remarks seem integral to the art. Ethan Mordden, who knows his way around backstage (Demented: The World of the Opera Diva; The Splendid Art of Opera), has gleefully amassed hundreds of such anecdotes, exchanges and choice bits of opera lore, along with some less celebrated stories. "Yet there is history here," he says, "for if many of the tales are silly, many others are telling...
...story should seem familiar: 1984 a year late. But as in so many key movies of the decade (Blade Runner, Diva, the Mad Max films), texture is text here, submerging the plot in a garage sale of 20th century detritus. Brazil is a place, like Stalin's Russia or the British welfare state, where everything is planned but nothing quite works. A Rube Goldberg spy machine kibitzes with a roving bloodshot electronic eye, then wheels away in a deranged gait. Giggling plastic surgeons do their "snip snip slice slice" with metal clamps and Saran Wrap...
Subway, Luc Besson's retarded new film about crime and punishment in the Parisian underground, is everything you'd expect from the post-Diva school of French, filmmaking: lettuce-crisp photography, a plot no less difficult to follow than the average Jacobean tragedy, plenty of MTV ear-and-eye candy, a handsome hero, a tongue-in-chic heroine, and beaucoup world-weary supporting characters who walk around with Arc de Triomphe-sized chips on their shoulders...
...reluctant diva, with a disarming practical streak. "I think I've accepted it now," says Battle, 37, of her stardom. "But until quite recently, I thought one must always be prepared for other things in life. I've been a secretary. I've been a teacher. Star? Diva? Divas don't do Despina. I do Despina, so do the two go together...