Word: drunken
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Crackdown on drunken drivers raises hopes-and doubts
John Bottoms and Francois de la Giroday deliver arresting, finely tuned performances. De la Giroday's sardonic antics with the mounds of toast his drunken, bitter humor, and his ability to shift gears--to portray both a self-possessed success and a collapsed failure--are outstanding. Bottoms' stooped, hulking gait and his combination of down-dirty badness and querulous insecurity breathe life into a difficult and confusing character. He recalls Henry Fonda at his most cranky in On Golden Pond in his ornery refusal to admit that he is pleased by something done for him, his obstinate pessimism, his scorn...
...that menace them. And perhaps no aspect of nuclear weapons is as terrifying as their arbitrariness, their capacity to obliterate the hopes, plans, and dreams of mankind. They threaten to make the past irrelevant and the future impossible. They wobble like crockery in the clumsy hands of blind and drunken children, the bureaucracies and coteries that have so far maintained the balance of terror...
...apparent domestic bliss (illustrated annoyingly with giddy romps on the beach to the strains of Billy Joel), the affair begins to take on an air of "Star is Born" fatality. Tory, at first the more stable of the two, has a drunken tantrum at a party when Chris dances with a man. Things get tenser as it becomes likely that the pair, now evenly matched, will have to compete against each other to go to the Olympics, a prospect they have feared since their first night, when they got stoned, watched TV, arm-wrestled steamily before hopping into...
...waters hold untold secrets. The intensity deepens and comes to a climax in the third act: as in a horror movie, the normality of Antonia's surroundings only heightens the terror prescribed by Dr. Miracle. The epilogue finds Hoffmann back in the tavern where he began the evening-drunken, disheveled and disabused of idealistic notions, but inspired to write his feverish tales. For all its legerdemain, the staging provides an unsentimental, clear-eyed view of the only serious opera by the man whom Rossini called the "Mozart of the Champs Elys...