Word: dulling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...truth, dreams and illusion. Yet with a monologue that closes on "Since life is a dream at best, and even dreams themselves are dreams," and lines like "Is the truth not what it seemed," and "To live is but to dream," the message seems to settle into a dull cliche, only occasionally striking the desired emotional chord...
Where once only sagebrush and tumbleweed dotted dull gray desert, a modern hotel ($94 a night), a 4,300-ft. airport runway, a two-story redwood shopping center and strings of small wooden houses now adorn the hills. A sophisticated sewage-treatment plant draws raves from visiting experts, and wildlife officials marvel at the increase in birds that breed in the long-barren acres...
...colors that sign his Arlesian period, the yellow, ultramarine and mauve. In the late spring, "the landscape gets tones of gold of various tints, green-gold, yellow-gold, pink-gold, and in the same way bronze, copper, in short starting from citron yellow all the way to a dull, dark yellow color like a heap of threshed corn. And this combined with the blue-from the deepest royal blue of the water to the blue of the forget-me-nots, cobalt . .." Some artists' letters are unrevealing about their work; others mythologize it. Van Gogh's correspondence was unique...
...April bloom is to glimpse Van Gogh rendering them ("Absolutely clear ... A frenzy of impastos of the faintest yellow and lilac on the original white mass"). Even his symbolism leaves its traces. One cannot see the purple underlights in ploughed furrows against the sunset without thinking of the strange, dull mauve luminescence that persvades the earth in The Sower, helping suggest that this dark creature fecundating the soil under the citron disk of the declining sun is some kind of local deity, an agrestic harvest god. One apple tree will evoke the Japanese roots of Van Gogh's spike...
Moreover, Impulse successfully sets itself apart from ordinary thrillers by legitimately developing its plot and characters. For the most part, the characters in this film come across as real, and if the acting is somewhat nondescript, the tempo at least keeps things from getting dull. In fact, because relationships and conflicts crop up so intensely fast, it is easy initially to mistake Impulse for a drama rather than a psychological thriller...