Word: gothic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...flushed by his rise "from roaches to riches." He has 10% of Rocky, which U.A. hopes will gross more than $40 million and a five-picture contract with the studio. He is holding out for a seven-figure deal on his next project, a "great romantic gothic" movie about Edgar Allan Poe. He also wants to star in the upcoming version of Superman. But Marlon Brando, who will play Superman's father, has veto rights on casting. Says Sly: "I hope he doesn't think I do a cheap imitation of him in the love scene with...
...more remarkable is that he can use a welding torch and glue. With tin, antique doorknobs, hip baths, umbrellas, bicycle parts, lamp shades, stained glass, saucepan lids, Victrola horns, ear trumpets, soup strainers, miles of wicker and wiring, he transforms cartoon fantasies into whispering, whistling, wheezing, whirring, gothic-kinetic machines that work, but mostly play. And mock...
...ugly-duckling adolescent who is first encouraged in social flirtations, then undone by an attractive, more popular cousin. Director Joan Micklin Silver (Hester Street) misses the stronger undercurrents of F. Scott Fitzgerald's original story, just as Novice Director Peter Werner is defeated by the portentous gothic glooms of the Joyce Carol Gates story he adapted, In the Region of Ice. Actress Fionnuala Flanagan, though, finds just the right portions of grave surprise and spiritual disquiet in the role of a young nun besieged and baffled by the unrelenting attentions of one of her students. Werner at least displays...
...same might be said of Margaret Atwood's writing in Lady Oracle. The novel does not develop; it meanders, circling around and turning in on itself - letting its contours be defined by the chaos of the heroine's psyche. Italicized chunks of Joan Foster's latest gothic romance pop up just when one is expecting the next chapter in her life. The reader is kept off balance by jagged shifts from the comfortable ordinariness of situation comedy to the casual cruelty of slapstick farce to the gripping panic of surreal nightmare...
...suggests that within every classically shaped woman there may be a ballooning romantic waiting to get out. She is also a useful vehicle for a meditation on the possibilities of modern fiction. In unobtrusive layers of allusion, Atwood pays homage to earlier forms of the novel - the picaresque, the gothic romance, the Bildungsroman and Victorian saga. She tries to shoehorn her heroine's life into the coherent contours of those forms, but Joan Foster won't sit still for the fitting. Even the baggiest literary shapes require a greater certainty about life than heroine - or author - can muster...