Word: hysterias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Australia, where they live on scraps of bitter memory and paranoid imaginings of a comparably tumultuous future. Although they appear to be part of the vast middle-class world in their adopted country, there is an untouchable inwardness in their spirits, and eventually they retreat into armed-survivalist hysteria...
Preston Sturges used to write and direct this stuff pretty well, with gusts of anarchic energy and a gaggle of pruny character actors to undercut the sentiment. Frank Capra was a master at building social comedy to the apex of hysteria, then pulling a happy-ending miracle out of his hat. Ron Howard, even after Splash and Cocoon, ain't these guys, yet. When he lets his film relax into hip facetiousness, and when Keaton parades his elfin jock swagger, Gung Ho is agreeable. But its relentless stereotyping of the Japanese provokes winces and worse. Its tone swings violently from...
...Forster's A Room with a View is like A Passage to India in miniature. But in his later novel, the sexual hysteria loosed in Miss Quested by her visit to an exotic land results in major melodrama. Lucy's milder--and curable --case of the same malaise creates only a delightful Wildean farce. At least that's all it does in this movie version of Forster's minor and diverting novel. The formality of James Ivory's style suits this spirit admirably, counterpointing and controlling the theatrical overplaying he encourages among his players. Maggie Smith as Lucy's dithering...
...make "any big decisions . . . without taking a day to think it over." At a forum on the suicides, parents and others shouted down Psychiatrist John Florian Riedler with such comments as "I once tried to commit suicide, years ago. No one ever tried to help me." Said Riedler: "Hysteria swept over this part of town last week...
During the past year, the public has been deluged with misinformation and preoccupied with the stigma of "high-risk groups." In the face of the hysteria, the fears, the reactions and ramifications, the Festival of Life comes as a positive contribution--not trying to explain what has happened or reassure us about the future, but focusing our attention on the present, the reality of what we can do for people in need...