Word: foils
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Nina Sawyer '01 provides a luminous foil for Yerma's intensity in Maria, a village friend of Yerma's who is lucky enough to be blessed with children--and to possess neither Yerma's depths nor her demons. Kate Arms assumes a commanding presence as the most cruel of the washerwomen who gossip about Yerma's barrenness and cast aspersions on her fidelity, but she is equally comfortable in the sympathetic, backgrounded role of Dolores, the witch-woman who provides Yerma with ancient pagan remedies against infertility. Even the minor players bring sparkle and depth to their characters: Kristen Rolf...
Accordingly, the relationship between Gere and Ling is one of the few things that elevates the movie above the generic. The culture clash becomes all the more striking, as we see how the two learn to work together thus providing a foil for the isolation that all the other Chinese elements create...
...will. It is also Jerome's final act, in a ghostly mirroring of Vincent's, that saves the ending from outright banality; the image he leaves--of a silver medal flushed to gold--is arresting, if not terribly subtle. However, Jerome remains a shadowy figure, more a conceptual foil than a full-bodied character...
...that culminates in his befriending the Dalai Lama, whose friendship and spiritual guidance emboldens him to return to and face tangled domestic issues at home. The relative lack of compelling ideas and characters to identify with before this enlightenment--basically, during Harrer's journey to Tibet--acts as a foil for the movie's latter, more fulfilling half...
...Diner (1982) is a coffee movie. Bunch of guys, hunched over bottomless cups and greasy food, stabbing out smokes in cheap foil ashtrays, bantering while the sun yawns. A coffee movie is Reservoir Dogs (1992): black suits, thin ties, some talk perhaps of virginity, of appointments, of tipping. Coffee is sallow men, indoor men, men of fluorescent-lit worlds and darker. A coffee movie is Midnight Run (1988): Odd couple on the road and on edge; crabby, dusty and tired. Small white ceramics, with a red stripe at the lip. The happy ending? DeNiro opens a coffee shop...