Word: ests
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...characters act only out of the bas est of motives: Dad, for example, gets canned from his p.r. job because of the sudden family disgrace. He then spends much of the film trying to hunt down and kill his own child, as if to win back community respect. Even a score by the usually excellent Bernard Herrman is of little help. Herrman did the music for many of Hitchcock's best films (Vertigo, Psycho). His participation in It's Alive lends it a fleeting and futile air of quality, like a concert virtuoso playing piano in a cathouse...
...they have forgotten the simple fact that real people are trying to live everyday lives in a place that could instantly be turned into a gigantic combat zone. Inevitably they are bound together by a mutual abhorrence of war. The most effective speakers are people who have the great est reason to be bitter: the wives and parents of young men killed on both sides of the Yom Kippur War. Their remembrances of their loved ones, of ten spoken through tears, render the desolation of personal loss, and make one ashamed of glib generalizations spouted from a safe distance west...
...Piers the ancient Gnostic beliefs became central. With a scholar friend, he linked the Gnostics' world-scorning pessimism with the still mysterious downfall of the Knights Templar. The Templars flourished as a chivalric order during the Crusades, eventually becoming one of the strong est financial, military and political forces in Europe, only to be swept away abruptly in the 14th century by the Inquisition on unconvincing charges of heresy and sexual deviation...
Looking resplendent in furs, Sophia Loren, 40, went skiing in France's Haute-Savoie with Husband Carlo Ponti, 61, and sons Cipì, 6, and Dodo, 2. Sophia avoided going downhill, however, preferring cross-country, and did so well that she extracted praise from her instructor. "Comme elle est belle," an onlooker was heard to say, more in tribute to Sophia than to her skiing. The rest of the family cautiously kept off the slopes. Après-ski, Cipì was Mama's favorite escort, going so far as to take Sophia to a restaurant for fondue...
...truth. The heroin is as shackling a possession as the bag of gold in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. Indeed, it is worse. Chaucer's three thieves at least thought that the gold was benign. Their catastrophe stemmed from disregarding Christian doctrine: radix malorum est cupiditas (greed is the root of all evil). Without a moral compass, Stone's characters cannot even plead ignorance. The irony that the heroin's value is rooted in its destructiveness does not escape them, but they cannot drop it. Its force has irradiated their world. They know...