Word: eiffel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Vegas was in the midst of building a real urban center, trying to turn what was just a break from sanity - fake Eiffel Tower! giant dancing fountain! a dance in every lap! - into a permanent installation of insanity. If we decide that we don't need a resort town that's roughly the same size as Washington, D.C. (which Las Vegas is) - that we can't continue to devote as many resources to gambling, tasting menus, spas, strip joints and nightclubs as we do to our national government - then we finally revert from being a nation of optimistic materialism...
...seeds of its own destruction but hands them out like a Burpee's salesman. An early scene, flashing back to 17th century France, plays like a lost Monty Python sketch. For its modern-day Paris scenes, the movie borrows some set pieces (including the blowing up of the Eiffel Tower) from Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Team America: World Police, an action comedy performed by puppets, from whom the expressionless performers appear to have taken their acting cues...
...Within the elegant, futuristic interior, chef Gilles Stassart prepares lunches and dinners that are as changing and captivating as the panoramic views of the Seine, the Eiffel Tower and the Parisian cityscape. Something of a philosopher, Stassart challenges the notion that "a meal is simply something to nourish us, and taste but a sensation in your mouth." He is also given to discoursing on the ancient conflict between Apollo, god of the arts, reason and harmony, and Dionysus, god of wine, ecstasy and disorder. "Philosophically, we are trying to set aside this opposition between the body and soul," he declares...
...project into screen reality after Terry Gilliam and others failed. The ultimate fetishist auteur, Snyder takes hallowed pulp artifacts--the '70s horror movie Dawn of the Dead, the Frank Miller graphic novel 300 and now this--and films them with the near fanatic fidelity of someone constructing an Eiffel Tower replica out of matchsticks. To Watchmen, he brings a reverence for the text that equals Mel Gibson's in The Passion of the Christ and comes close to Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho...
...could have found no more devoted Watch-man than Snyder. The ultimate fetishist-auteur, he takes hallowed pulp artifacts - the '70s horror movie Dawn of the Dead, the Frank Miller graphic novel 300 and now this - and films them with the near-fanatic fidelity of someone constructing an Eiffel Tower replica out of matchsticks...