Word: graphically
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...they would make their own had for decades been honorable Hollywood genres: the exotic epic, the adaptation of famous novels, the decorous comedy of manners. But with spiraling costs, the epic soon went microscopic. Big-budget films today are less likely to be adapted from classic novels than from graphic ones?essentially, long comic books. Comedies stayed around, but lost their manners. Hollywood movies, which had been traditionally tailored to the female audience, now went after the male market, valuing impact over nuance, the gross over the gracious. If Merchant-Ivory wanted the old genres, they could have them...
...will honor the pleas of the film's press agents and not reveal who's who and what happens. Suffice to say that this adaptation of the graphic novel by John Wagner has four outbreaks of jolting violence to give some kick to a penetrating character study; and that the real Joey Cusack has a savory showdown with his mob-boss brother Richie (played by William Hurt with a rich pleasure in menace). Mortensen, whose Tom is as stalwart as his Middle-Earth Aragorn, is completely convincing and utterly hunky -a man worth loving, no matter...
Will Eisner's last book, The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (W.W. Norton; 148 pages; $20) arrives in bookstores early next week, just a few months after he died at age 87. A key figure in the development of graphic literature, Eisner worked in "the biz" for over 60 years. He set new standards for the form's possibilities with his cinematic weekly Spirit series during the 1940s, and then again in the late twentieth century, with his tireless boosterism for long-form "graphic novels." His final book combines literary biography and criticism...
...spite of its admirable ambition, The Plot doesn't perfectly gel into a masterpiece. It suffers chiefly from a problem I have found in many of Eisner's graphic novels: a sometimes-fatal distrust of the audience. Expository dialogue, repetitious action and one-dimensional characterization make The Plot feel more like a lesson than a deeply involving story. In the biographical first third, for example, character development never goes beyond stereotype, as if giving Golovinski more than one dimension would confuse us. One scene depicts a young Golovinski stealing his mother's necklace for no apparent purpose. Presumably fabricated...
...hours of your time, spread over two evenings in the theater. To see what is essentially a subtitled Italian television mini-series without recognizable stars, special effects, or for that matter, hot sex or graphic violence. To say that The Best of Youth demands an unusual commitment from us understates the case...