Word: embellishments
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This statement, coming from the author of Gravity's Rainbow, is simply not credible. If he can absorb and then brilliantly embellish the scientific progress that led up to the development of the V-2 rocket, he can look up tendril in a dictionary. And Pynchon's stories are not as bad as he claims. The Small Rain rather artfully juxtaposes the tedium of peacetime Army service, a catastrophic hurricane and sex. The Secret Integration accurately catches the locutions of an alcoholic jazz musician. Under the Rose is an evocative spy story set in a kind of operetta...
...merely an afterthought or, at best, a happy byproduct of the movie. But the success of Saturday Night Fever in 1977, with its hit Bee Gees score, taught Hollywood a valuable lesson: rock sound tracks can be not only big sellers but big promotional tools for the films they embellish. The lesson was resoundingly driven home with last year's Flashdance, whose album (4.9 million copies sold in the U.S.), hit singles like What a Feeling, and omnipresent videos helped turn a mediocre film into a sleeper success, grossing $97 million in the U.S. and Canada...
...fulfill his ambition to create "pure cinema": the manipulation of universal emotions by camera placement, shot duration, the dramatic use of color, sound and editing. As two future film makers, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, wrote of the director in 1957, "In Hitchcock's work, form does not embellish content, it creates it." Hitchcock, less interested in universal theories than in the international box office, put his artistic aims more matter of factly: "The Japanese audience should scream at the same time as the Indian audience...
...broom sedge, oak and willow. At one time the island was also home to a prison. In another time there was a drug rehabilitation center here. Neither is in operation any more, and the red brick buildings now resemble what one imagines would be left after the bomb. Creepers embellish low walls fashioned from mortar and smooth river rocks by some forgotten mason-an ax murderer...
...later Holmes. The confines of a medieval monastery, with its many regulations, restrictions and mystical devotion, prove to be the ideal setting for a mystery. The very richness of the late medieval church culture--a tapestry of illuminated manuscripts, intricate architecture, relies, and feverish religious cults--would embellish any novel. But in the skillful hands of Umberto Eco, the monastery becomes the forum for discussing theological and philosophical problems, many of which remain strangely relevant in today's world...