Word: garish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Union City has other things on its mind. For a start, this is a film noir in garish, ominous primary colors; the design takes its cue from the camp surrealism of modern Germanic directors like Daniel Schmid and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. More important, however funny-peculiar the plot, Union City tracks its characters' shabby lives and squalid passions so relentlessly that it becomes a portrait of lower-middle-class despair. And Lipscomb's performance is devastatingly acute. His gestures are just too broad, his harsh voice much too loud; Harlan's swagger and insecurity...
Union City has the chic punk sensibility of New York fashion. Starring Deborah Harry in a non-singing role, the story is based on a cheap thriller, The Corpse Next Door. With garish Fifties sets and color, astutely overacted in Eisenhower-era soullessness, the psychological disintegration of a jealous husband is slowly depicted. The husband thinks he has accidentally murdered a milk thief and hides him in the empty apartment next door, a plot mechanism which allows the actors and actresses to camp up their roles to the limit, while dressing up in fashionable rags as well...
Early in the evening came the world premiere of David Del Tredici's Happy Voices. The composer may have intended a bravura show for the orchestra, but his garish, repetitive work was more like a Richard Strauss waltz heard in a nightmare. When Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No.1, with Rudolf Serkin as soloist, followed, the listener was prepared for old-fashioned piano busting. Instead, the instrument could scarcely be heard except in solo passages and in a lyrical dialogue between the cellos and the piano...
Enter her new lawn-distance neighbor. Hannah Mae Bindler (Eileen Brennan), a Lone-Star State emigree, is wearing a garish outfit, and her accessories are an unstoppered tongue and the musk of a rampant libido. Culture clash soon gives way to kaffeeklatsch. Maude reveals that her husband is off on one of his adulterous secretarial safaris. Despite having suffered the occasional infidelity, Hannah Mae claims that her husband Carl Joe "don't take a breath unless I say, 'Carl Joe, breathe...
...along the muddy side streets. Women beggars, their faces concealed completely by hoods with mesh eye holes, wail for baksheesh outside rug stores. Turbaned tribesmen from the mountains stride along shouldering huge bundles. Boys offer sticks of lamb shashlik grilled over charcoal at street corners. Outside moviehouses there are garish posters of Afghan-made westerns in which ersatz Omar Sharifs twirl six-shooters in each hand. But the cinemas are open only in the afternoons, and ticket sales are slow because, it is said, people fear grenade throwing. Next to the movie posters are government placards showing a turbaned official...