Word: greats
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Such moments aside, The Great Train Robbery is a curiously enervated affair. In his previous films, Westworld and Coma, Crichton has shown a gut instinct for creating nasty suspense. His movies looked sloppy, but fiendish humor and scare tactics helped paper over the visual lapses. Train Robbery, paradoxically, looks gorgeous but lacks bite and narrative rhythm. The thieves carry out their complex scheme in a series of repetitive, evenly paced sequences, most of which involve the hijacking of keys to a safe. When you've seen one key theft, you've seen them all. The robberies...
...piety of the wealthy bluebloods he swindles. But Connery's low-key performance is often vitiated by Donald Sutherland's uncharacteristically broad caricature of a bum bling aide-de-crime. Then again, when the delicious leading lady is at hand, both men tend to fade away. The great train robbery may well have been the crime of its century, but it looks like petty theft compared with Down's ability to steal a scene. -Frank Rich
...assure us that their lines will require no emotional response." Lytton Strachey, recalls the aphorist, once told him that Horace could not be a good poet because everything he wrote was a platitude. "This is the Romantic view of poetry, for in fact it requires a very great poet to make platitudes come alive, since they are sentiments we once felt but, through the dulling of our minds by habit, have ceased any longer to feel...
...recalcitrant as circus animals and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain." And few have expressed more simply the pleasures of that word tamer. "Every writer and artist wonders what in the world people of other professions can find to live for. This is the great advantage they possess, which more than makes up for the little they usually earn." The words may jump and snarl, snap and bite when Brenan sits down at his own desk. But when they march onto his page, they almost always perform marvelous and original tricks. - Gerald Clarke
...Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The book belongs in that company. Like Blake seeing a world in a grain of sand, Professor Janovy discerns universes in the creeks, bogs and fields of the Sandhills country. He makes the reader care for creatures as large as the great blue heron, as small as the inch-long plains killifish, and as obscure as the parasites of the genus Trich-odina that live in the minnow's gills. "Early on," writes Janovy, "the killifish was shown to be not a fish but a community, and the community itself encompasses...