Word: flashings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...same cartoon clarity whether it documents the townspeople's journey or dramatizes their sweetest, saddest fantasies. A girl bumps into some soldiers and sees them as G.I.s, come to take her to America; in fact they are Germans about to slaughter her, and her vision is a dream flash the moment before she dies. Early in the film, the villagers hear a faint but rousing rendition of The Battle Hymn of the Republic and imagine it is the American Army; in fact it is only a phonograph record, but the villagers believe, and one young man, scanning the hills...
Kate Nelligan portrays Susan as a superior woman locked in the palace tower of her awful loneliness. Her performance is a little essay on exalted anxiety: allowing her suppressed anger to explode in a girlish squeal, semaphoring fear in a flash of the eyes, ragging her estranged husband for not feeling pain as exquisitely as she does. But there are some moments no one could bring to life. Who could infuse dramatic tension into the leisurely reading of a newspaper? What actress could bring off that old Oscar-cadging ploy, the sudden quiet hysterics in a bubble bath...
...whose liberty a lie. I saw the Shadow of the Veil as it passed over my baby. I saw the cold city towering above the blood-red land. I held my face beside his little cheek, showed him the star-children and the twinkling lights as they began to flash, and stilled with an even-song the unvoiced terror of my life. The idea of the veil, as the way a man sees his life, is frightening and horrible. It cries out and angers you. Imagine such a limitation, such a prison for oneself or one's children...
...Nelligan describes it, there was no flash of light when she first stood on a stage, no epiphany or dreams of glory. Just the opposite: she was comfortable. "I didn't feel elated or ecstatic, just at home." She wanted to stay in such a pleasant place-the theater, that is. In her second year, she auditioned for London's Central School of Speech and Drama, which was seeing applicants at Yale. She was accepted, but then ran into a problem: insufficient funds...
Whether Mailer's work goes down "as a strange aberrations flash...or as one of the most seminal and enduring voices in contemporary literary history remains to be determined," Mills notes in the final chapter. But it is certain that the author's life alone will be remembered for its enormous and diverse undertakings. Arranged in strictly chronological form, the biography seems to gather together all of Mailer's activities--starting with his career as a Harvard engineering major--together with hundreds of quotes from wives, editors, friends and the like. This technique creates a many-sided view...