Word: eighteenth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Part of the film wants to be a fairy tale, part a travelogue, part a Victorian novel, part an accurate reconstruction of eighteenth-century life. At least Kubrick can't be accused of what many critics are now attacking Costa-Gavras for, being a director condemned--as a bad director might have been in Dante's Inferno--to making the same film over and over again. Barry Lyndon is as unlike anything Kubrick has ever done as it is below the level of anything Kubrick has ever done...
...camera lovingly over a tableaux while playing highbrow music on the soundtrack is a substitute for thought and action. Kubrick's sets are at first startling--the lush green beauty of Irish hills and loughs; the crazy-quilt pattern of farmland in the Low Countries; the grounds of an eighteenth-century country house; the glittering interiors of the courts of Central Europe. But the cinematography stays on a travelogue level. Kubrick does nothing to the superb natural scenery to create images; unwilling to create, he simply records...
STEINBERG'S UNDISGUISED liberal Democratic bias and his simplistic hyperbole also mar his account. He refers to President Coolidge's second term as "four more years of what became known as the 'Roaring Twenties,' an era of gangsterism, wholesale violation of the Eighteenth Amendment, and an insane speculation in stocks and real estate." Given a choice between repeating the most trite, superficial accounts of history and attempting a more sophisticated version, Steinberg invariably prefers the former...
...haven't seen it after all these years you should quit stalling. Right now last spring's bicentennial binge, "Paul Revere's Boston," is finishing its five-month run. It's interesting for colonial silver-and-furniture buffs, but I for one am becoming very bored with the eighteenth century. just opened is an exhibit called "Northem Prints of the Late Middle Ages"--including Holbein's Dance of Death, Durer's Melancholla and other masterpieces. Certainly worth catching. Through Dec. 7; the MFA is free on Sundays from...
Aristotle observed that "drunken and harebrained" women most often had children like themselves, "morose and languid." Eighteenth-century British physicians reported that drinking gin led not only to the widespread debauchery of the time-which was vividly depicted in Hogarth's etchings-but also to a spate of "weak, feeble and distempered children." Modern medicine has only recently confirmed the ancient folklore. Alcoholic mothers often do bear children with a host of birth defects: skull and facial deformations, defects in the cardiovascular system and mental and physical retardation...