Word: flash
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THIS IS ONE instance where black and white would have been better than color. The Color Purple, an adaptation of Alice Walker's gritty but triumphant novel and Steven Spielberg's debut directing a "serious" film, suffers from too much technicolor, too much flash in the face of the book's grimy realism. Spielberg transforms scenes that portrayed the grim existence of Southern agrarian Blacks into fields of dreamy and idealistic color that resemble an explosion at an Izod Lacoste factory more than they do images of rural life in backwoods Georgia...
...media footage. When Reagan spoke to the nation, he refered to the day's human tragedy and canonized new heroes. One simply couldn't come out and say it: our rocket had blown up. The nation was emasculated, bewildered, dumbstruck as glorious pride turned to impotence in a blinding flash...
...plane kind of make a slow descent and disappear, and a mushroom of flame shot right into the air," said Boyce Jardine, who was driving nearby. "Actually, there was no noise at all. It was like watching a silent movie." But others heard a sound. "I saw a flash in the sky, like a sunset," said Judy Parsons, another motorist. "Then, in a couple of seconds, I heard an explosion. Then black smoke starting coming up." The witnesses seemed to agree on one vital point: the plane exploded after it plowed into the small trees near Gander Lake, not before...
...filmmaker as gifted as Spielberg can cow or neuter his talent forever. The Color Purple is speckled with epiphanies, especially in a flash of crosscutting that magically transplants an African plain, where Nettie has gone as a missionary, behind a Georgia bush; Celie looks up from her hymnal and--wham!--a bulldozer crashes through the chancel of Nettie's church thousands of miles away. None of this bravura, though, has liberated the attractive cast. Whoopi Goldberg suffers knowingly as Celie; Danny Glover, as "Mr.," looks vainly for a note to strike besides befuddled menace; Margaret Avery inhabits Shug without illuminating...
Indeed, within those first 40 minutes a film should show some sort of action, instead of narrating the plot while people walk around on the beach. The movie assumes a silly call and answer format, with Joyce's wife telling what happened, followed by a two second flash of some actor doing or saying the exact same thing that Joyce's wife told us he would, kind of like an instant replay...