Word: flivver
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...idea here is big scale. In olden times you gave Charlie Chaplin a pair of roller skates, or Laurel and Hardy a decrepit flivver, and they would make some kind of magic with these severely limited means. In the new century, it doesn't take a village to make us laugh, but it does sometimes require overturning a bus (piloted by Cuba Gooding Jr. as a disgraced football official and jammed with Lucy impersonators on their way to a convention), crashing a helicopter or accidentally setting a land speed record in a rocket car driven by Whoopi Goldberg and Lanai...
...Thunder road test (running over things) and the Rocky boxing match (punching, kicking and gouging people). These are mostly boy toys made for the computer generation. You won't see a VR game of some sentimental senior- citizen film -- unless it's Driving Miss Daisy Crazy, with the flivver flying down back roads and a convoy of rednecks in pursuit...
They couldn't say no. Wednesday they will roll into Grand Rapids by plane, flivver, oxcart and unicycle for two days of laughs and an occasional serious thought if they can't stop it before it gets...
...this, hundreds of them, passing before the subtly shaded and disciplined lens of Cinematographer Nestor Almendros' camera, an eye that never wanders toward pure realism or toward sentimentality either, that Places in the Heart derives much of its strength. The dust rising from the wheels of a hurrying flivver, the chilly darkness of a cavernous bank, the way the early morning sun strikes a field of cotton, and the camera's simple crane up to reveal the immensity of the field and of the task before the little band of pickers toiling in it are palpable. Ultimately...
...seabed under cultivation but may eventually be commuting back and forth to shallow, Atlantis-like undersea apartment clusters. It is tempting to see the baby sub not just as a prototype toy for the rich in Florida and California but as a seagoing Model T Ford, a future flivver of the deep, or like the Curtiss Jenny biplane, some kind of ur-machine that may usher in a new age of travel. In that perspective Kittredge and Jacobson, like early aviation nuts who paid for their rickety planes by giving flying lessons or built them on a financial shoestring...