Word: hymns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Bountiful succeeds primarily as a painstaking character portrayal that is unusually perceptive and occasionally brilliant. Geraldine Page is wonderful as Mother Watts, the doting, doddering old protagonist, a hymn-singing, sentimental Jewish mother who happens to be a Texas Christian. She lives in a cramped Houston apartment with her milquetoast son Ludie (John Heard) and shrill daughter-in-law (Carlin Glynn), leading a weary existence that only aggravates her deteriorating heart condition...
...skulking emergence from prison to the army's brutal murder of a street urchin, takes place in gloom. The shadows are not soporific but turbulent with agonized life. They prefigure the almost celestial light in the finale, as the dead of Paris rise to join the living in a hymn that promises, then demands, a better future. The moment and the show are thrilling...
...luminous treatment of the rise and fall of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh some consider history's first monotheist, it unfolds in gradual waves to reveal two particularly striking moments: a ravishing trio for Akhnaten (a countertenor), his mother and his wife in the first act; and Akhnaten's glorious hymn to the sun disk in Act II. The prevailing mood, though, is dark and brooding, emphasized by Glass's use of an orchestra without violins. Rich in detail and sharp in characterization, Akhnaten...
Alexander composes a hymn to the cobblestones, "small, regular granite blocks of all colours" on old Moscow's streets: "When the rains washed away the dirt and dust, drawing colours from the heart of the stone, their chance mosaic was far richer than the asphalt's colourless monotony." Winter is a cause of wonderment as sleighs move silently through the snow-hushed city. Finally comes the happiest of seasons in Russia, spring, with its ritual opening of windows. "Fresh spring air, wild and cool, fills the room, bringing with it the city's bright polyphony of voices, bells, and squealing...
...fact, they have larger issues to lance. Although the film is set during Clement Attlee's Labor reign, it applies just as ferociously to Margaret Thatcher's pinchpenny Britain. With its double-edged title and its tone of bitter whimsy, A Private Function asks to be taken as a hymn to the meanness of the human spirit, in ) which the one decent soul is "a pathetic cringing nancy" to his wife and a "festering, bunion-scraping little pillock" to the local GP. The cheery camaraderie of Britain's postwar Ealing comedies has given way to pig-eat-pig biliousness--which...