Word: flashes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Boom! A cannon shot from the Society Jazz Band bass drum jolts the chattering crowd outside the Gertrude Geddes Willis Funeral Home into a brief silence. The casket is coming out. Boom! A second shot signals the stricken cadence of a dirge. The white gloves of the pallbearers flash in the morning sun as they float their burden to the silver-gray Cadillac hearse. The main party of mourners, a score or so, fit themselves into several cars waiting in line...
...town butcher (Joseph Leon) sweeps dirt off his porch into his house. Told to lower her voice, the wife (Mary Louise Wilson) of an eye doctor (Harold Gould) scrunches toward the floor. Occasionally, Simon abandons these hoary vaudeville turns for a flash of absurdist humor. The doctor's daughter (Pamela Reed), adorable as she is dumb, is asked what her favorite color is and replies, "Yellow. . . because it doesn't stick to your fingers so much." Her mother mutters: "I think she's wrong. I think it's blue...
Good vs. Evil is in. Since they perceived the "national mood" as desperate, the studios give us heroes and Super-heroes restoring order to chaos. The champions of American mythology--comic book characters--are back in action. Blond-haired, blue-eyed Flash Gordon battles sinister Orientals in outer space. Superman defends Truth, Justice, and the American Way. The public wants the old heroes, the old stories: ancient themes provide the grist for almost all American movies. Whether this does indeed say anything important about America's collective unconscious is an elastic point, and one easily stretched to banality...
Nicholson always has an aura of unnatural tension around him--he seems to wait a split second too long before reacting, and even then all of this extremes, violent or boyish, flash out of those same, perpetually half-shut eyes. With his hairline receding and the lines of his face hardening now into some sort of death mask. Nicholson doesn't try to play Chambers as the twenty-three year old punk Cain envisioned. Instead he slouches around like a bored satyr. He seems to revel in his decay, in his unnerving ability to play an utterly reptilian Don Juan...
...tangible dimension for her. Before the last week, it was merely an abstract dimension measured by movements in space. But now, she could feel a grip that was dry and hard and held her fast. Afternoons were like that--minutes seemed like hours, while she waited for a flash of inspiration that never came to rescue her. At night, time was slippery, and she could move and think freely. By 7 a.m. she had written half the 25-page conclusion. It was the evening and the morning of the first all-nighter...