Word: inert
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...Jazz Singer. Many silent-film stars' careers were destroyed by the triumph of sound; Cagney's was ensured by it. He was one of the first actors to grab an audience by sending dialogue special delivery, with a style of high-speed utterance that could animate even the most inert exchanges...
...legal battle; the Jobes' request to remove the feeding tube goes to court this week. However helpful, the A.M.A.'s new ruling cannot ease the heartbreak for families weighing such a decision. It is one thing to shut off a machine that is forcing the breath of life into inert lungs. It is emotionally far harder to withdraw the staff of life, even if it is dripping through a tube...
...four actors who play Peter, has moments of leonine power, and Vanessa Redgrave is striking as his treacherous sister. But the rest of the all-star cast--including Hannah Schygulla, Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard and Mel Ferrer--is lost in the pageantry. Edward Anhalt's script is flabby and inert, and history is contaminated with hokey invention (a bogus meeting in London, for instance, between Peter and Sir Isaac Newton...
...recognized, inhabits a landscape unknown to the Bard, that of 16th century Japan. And Goneril, Regan and Cordelia are here men called Taro, Jiro and Saburo. We are obviously far from the place of this tragic tale's mythic birth and noble retelling, and we are far from the inert reverence of the typical movie adaptation of a classic. Indeed, in Ran (which means "chaos" in Japanese) we venture into a territory where the very word adaptation distorts and diminishes both intention and accomplishment. For what Akira Kurosawa has done is to reimagine Lear in terms of his own philosophy...
...good. But how does Part II, post-1945, measure up to Part I, pre- 1933? Regrettably, not very well. Its beginnings include some striking and even distinguished paintings, notably Wols' scratched, muffled lumps of inert matter, pathetic as the scribblings on the wall of some mental dungeon, and some of Gunther Ueker's nail reliefs from the early '60s. But it is hard to raise much enthusiasm for Richard Oelze's spectral streetscapes or even late Max Ernst, let alone the sensitive but essentially academic abstractions by Willi Baumeister or Ernst Wilhelm Nay. Such things seem included as tunings...