Word: gusto
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this rarefied place, even victims are privileged: a bankrupt baron (David Carroll), an embattled industrialist (Timothy Jerome), a ballerina in decline (Liliane Montevecchi) and her dogsbody, a closet lesbian (Karen Akers). A dying accountant, played by Michael Jeter with a dazzling mix of febrile weakness and life-grabbing gusto, has enough money to live out his waning days in luxury, while a typist (Jane Krakowski) who moves from man to man always has her looks to fall back...
...could anyone think it helpful to impose upon the behavior of a long-lost era and a vanished social class the wisdom of modern Pop psychology? It prevents the actors from tearing into their roles with the black comic gusto that Glenn Close and John Malkovich brought to their feverish performances in Dangerous Liaisons last year. But besides spoiling the fun, this approach / blurs the work's value as a cautionary tale, capable of reminding us that motiveless malignity is a potent force in every age and one that not even Freud -- let alone humanistically inclined moviemakers -- can explain away...
...whose taste for apocalyptic catastrophe may have been sparked by talking to Leonardo in Rome) painted Ovid's story of the gods' revenge on the rebellious earth giants. These bearded, stumbling palookas in their peasants' breeches, crushed by the fall of rocks and masonry, are done with literally colossal gusto. The whole windowless chamber seems ready, for a moment, to totter and fall on your head. No room in Italy gives you a clearer sense of the mannerist delight in bizarre illusion. If one could imagine a halfway point between Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes and the gee-whiz delights...
When the plot turns and the characters gain control of their own justice, An Innocent Man improves. Selleck becomes likeable; his acting gains gusto. Instead of mumbling his poorly written lines, he wields Magnum P.I. inflections. And he infuses emotion into a simple comment about fighting. "It scares me," he says, "but I can handle...
...unknown." Otherwise, the identification process was simple, the scientists report, although "initially -- the study began during the summer months -- it was rather smelly." Surprisingly enough, they write, "the villagers were much less squeamish than we had expected." In fact, some went about their assigned task with great gusto, placing their cats' trophies in home freezers to await collection...