Word: gnomic
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...free zone" in New Mexico. Writer-director Todd Haynes, who made the importantly weird short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Poison, a minimalist epic of sex and longing in the age of aids, again has decay and estrangement in mind. This scarily confident, beautifully acted study is gnomic and anomic, like a TV disease movie made in an alternate universe. And in Moore's pretty, aggrieved face, Haynes finds the ideal vessel for his concerns...
...therefore a kind of guru to artists who seek gnomic "enactments" of pain, are obsessed by splits between private and public identity--including their own feelings of victimization--and treat the body as canvas. Not for nothing does one of Nauman's video pieces feature a bewildered rat in a Plexiglas maze, scuttling about under the bombardment of rock drumming. It's Nauman's idea of the relationship between artist and audience. The artist as hero is long gone from American culture, and the artist as social critic is ineffective, but Nauman, with the example of Dada before...
...horseman; the aristocrat takes no notice of his offer, and the butler takes no notice of the slight. His stillness may mask sexual fear: when Miss Kenton amiably approaches him, he freezes like a bruised virgin. The rest of the film Hopkins carries with a small gnomic smile that means a dozen things in a dozen scenes: gratitude, impatience, self-control. "I can say it's simple now," the actor acknowledges, "but it's taken years to distill my work to a more economic form. I suppose I'm pretty adept now at playing these rather still parts...
...going to be hearing a lot about Barton Fink in the next few weeks. Gnomic, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, just plain weird, it is the kind of movie critics can soak up thousands of words analyzing and cinephiles can soak up at least three espressos arguing their way through...
...play. The electronic bulletin boards offered by such computer networks as CompuServe and Genie are stuffed with doomsday speculations. And one need not be born again to experience a frisson of apocalyptic concern. Also enjoying a new spasm of popularity is the 16th century astrologer Nostradamus, one of whose gnomic utterances predicts the arrival in 1999 of the "Great King of Terror" -- easily identifiable as Saddam, to those with vivid imaginations...