Word: elan
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...patients provide Margaret with the excitement which is completely missing from her own life. In an attempt to save one of them, she seeks out Mike, the loan shark who is threatening him. Mike is a slick, charming con man, played with great, seedy elan by Joe Mantegna. He shows her some of the tricks of the con man trade, and for the first time in the movie we see Margaret shed her stiff exterior and smile...
Alas, that is not the case. An enchanting Beauty is about as difficult to come by as a formula for magic. Most of the women's roles are difficult and must be carried off with the sort of aristocratic elan that only technically strong performers can muster. The character dances and, above all, the mime are alien to many young performers, particularly Americans. Finally, the overall production needs a beneficent fairy of its own; The Sleeping Beauty is a miracle of scale and symmetry; glitz or vulgarity or plodding pedantry will turn it into a long night indeed...
...podium, Kemp reverts to a Southern California vernacular. Things he likes, from his family house in suburban Maryland to the flowering of capitalism in the Third World, are "really neat." He is proud of his erudition, using French phrases like elan vital, but he sometimes tosses out strange neologisms, like "braggadocious." His tastes are unabashedly middlebrow. He saw the musical Les Miserables three times and with characteristic gusto has become a one-man ad for the show, telling people that "it's the best musical since Man of la Mancha...
...scant impression, although Robert Torti is an oily villain and Greg Mowry a winsome underdog. Andrew Lloyd Webber's pastiche of American pop offers histrionic passages but no memorable tunes. Worse, the races -- the core of the plot -- look contrived. When one "engine" passes another, no burst of athletic elan justifies the triumph; sometimes the jockeying for position takes place out of view, sometimes the team fated to lose just reins itself in short of the finish line...
Even in Moscow, Klein took pictures free of cold war cliches or internationalist pieties. Though with less success than in his New York work, he got his Russians unabashed, not least in Bikini, his 1959 picture of a young woman dishing out elan vital while her elders deflate behind her. Even | Muscovites have brass, Klein seems to be saying. Even Communism has its bikinis. Though his pictures were once scorned as too subjective, they look now among the least predisposed, the most inquiring and inclusive. Klein has been known to call his camera variously a weapon, a mask, a disguise...