Word: gothic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...least 14 films. At heart, the novel's conflict is metaphysical: Valjean believes in the forgiving God of the New Testament, Javert in the retributive God of the Old Testament. The story resounds with images of Christian redemption. Yet it is by turns a panorama of the underclass, a Gothic romance about love at first sight threatened by family secrets, a psychological study and a radical tract. The novel's scale and complexity seemingly defy adaptation to a musical, especially one that in the fashion of opera, sets every word to song. The stage version's triumph is that...
Getting excited is a Canadian habit at budget time. So it was hardly surprising last week when people from Newfoundland to British Columbia stopped everything to discuss how the government's new $92 billion budget would affect their pocketbooks. In his budget message in Ottawa's Neo-Gothic House of Commons, Finance Minister Michael Wilson announced an 8.4% decrease in Canada's $24 billion national deficit, crowed about the country's improved economic outlook and promised a tax-reform program that would lower personal taxes. Wilson had barely finished announcing the good news when most Canadians yawned and turned their...
...relatives or rowing on the Schuylkill, although some of the characters in the story had a fortune in fantasy lives. So it is no surprise that Joseph Wambaugh, the former Los Angeles cop who writes well about the police (The Blue Knights, The Onion Field), attempts to establish a gothic mood. He associates the feeling with eastern Pennsylvania's brooding Germanic influences and forbidding estate architecture. His competition, Philadelphia Inquirer Reporter Loretta Schwartz-Nobel, prefers the interior decoration of the not-so-new journalism. She has had the doubtful advantage of interviewing the imprisoned criminals in the case, and likes...
...elaborate stacking (for this was the age of Rockefeller Center, not of the banal glass box) hinted at vastly oversized Mayan temples; the contrast between glittering surface and deep wells and slots of shadow suggested exuberance and secrecy conjoined, the "metropolitan style" of Big Business. Instead of quoting Gothic or Renaissance detail as an indirect sign of quality, the whole tower changed into a business logo, architecture as advertisement -- the archexample being William Van Alen's Chrysler Building, 1928-31, with friezes of hubcaps and wheels, gargantuan winged chrome radiator ornaments and stainless-steel finial...
...Crimes of the Heart neglects to deliver the goods. Once a comedy, it has now become a sad-sack elegy. The events that Henley and her cast pumped life into on Broadway have lost their juice. What went wrong? Is it that the intimate conversations, the teasings of Southern- gothic catastrophes, the colloquial bitchery ("She was known all over Copiah County as cheap Christmas trash"), the climactic conciliations -- all of which seemed fresh, if not downright impudent onstage -- play smug and stilted on the big screen? Or has something precious been lost? When does a faithful, almost literal adaptation turn...