Word: familiarizing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lexicon of Baconian imagery is famous. Its most familiar component is the screaming Pope, smearily rising from blackness like carnivorous ectoplasm, his throne indicated by a pair of gold finials, the whole enclosed in a sketchy cage -- homage to an original that Bacon firmly denies having ever seen, the Velasquez portrait of Innocent X in the Doria collection in Rome. There are the Crucifixion motifs, reflections of Grunewald and the Cimabue Crucifixion in Santa Croce that was partly destroyed by the 1966 Florence flood, whose sinuous and near boneless body Bacon once startlingly compared to "a worm crawling down...
...ever seen." The novella-length story is an exercise in escalating gruesomeness, and the urgency and awkwardness of the narrative lend credence to the preposterous. So does the setting, a supermarket where a random bunch of shoppers have been trapped by what may be the end of the world. Familiar brand names anchor the incredible; a flying monster invades the store and is set on fire by the beleaguered defenders, finally crashing "into the spaghetti sauces, splattering Ragu and Prince and Prima Salsa everywhere like gouts of blood." King's private lines to primal nightmares and American consumerism remain...
...wouldn't it be nice if the science-fantasy genre, recently festooned with cotton-candy aliens and the air of suburban benevolence, could be refreshed by making contact with the laws of dramatic gravity? As it happens, Cocoon has many familiar elements: it could be called E.T. Meets the Over-the-Hill Gang, or On Golden Pod. Like last Christmas' Starman, it contains a love story ^ between an extraterrestrial (Tahnee Welch, Raquel's lithe and stunning daughter) and a young American (Steve Guttenberg); here sex is represented as a love-light that ricochets around the swimming pool. Like...
Robbins' more familiar virtues are evident too, particularly his inspired casting. In selecting Luders -- a fine partner but a phlegmatic performer often taken for granted by the audience and even by himself -- the choreographer rinses away years of familiarity to present a dancer of mesmerizing ardor. Luders reveals a plangency and aplomb that match Farrell's stroke for stroke...
Sidestepping the familiar monuments of Paris, Kertesz sought candid bits of street life, preferably from a high vantage point, where he could inspect the world without engaging it. He had a geometer's orientation: in many of his best shots, people are distant figures, elegantly distributed among the grids and arcs of the city. The Paris that issued from his camera was not the serene city of Atget, immemorial and mostly unpeopled. Neither was it Brassai's close-in platform for the dramas of the demimonde. Kertesz's Paris was like the woman in his picture Satiric Dancer: pert, ironic...