Word: ironist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Besides being brave, Nick is something of an ironist. This quality, if nothing else, is a sign of intelligence. Before taking up fire fighting, Nick was a cop falsely tainted by corruption. Now the very people who secretly profited by victimizing him -- the crooked, volcanic mayor (Rod Steiger) and the bland, bureaucratic police commissioner (Harvey Keitel) -- need him to lead the hunt for a maniacal killer...
...offer the ironist cannot refuse. Not only is the commissioner his long-loathed brother, he is also the man who married Christine (Susan Sarandon), a haughty socialite for whom Nick still yearns. His price for cooperation? One tete-a-tete with that ambiguous lady. In Shanley's world, it is inevitable that this does not go awfully well. Nick asks her to listen to the wine breathe, serves octopus for the main course and generally comes on too strong. It is also inevitable that a perfect substitute for Christine will soon turn up. And it does, in the form...
With this film, Itami is less a knockabout ironist, more a sly cinematic Dostoyevsky. The clues to this secret identity lie in his sudden alternations of mood between quiet and noisy desperation, his fascination with the moral force of the holy fool -- the part the director's graceful wife Miyamoto is essentially playing -- and, above all, his allusions to Crime and Punishment. As in the great novel, it is a tenacious detective's patience that forces the final confession a criminal requires for his soul's peace. But the entertaining dexterity with which Itami plays this potentially heavy hand...
...account that emerges from that brief visit is, as one would expect, quickened by a novelist's eye. Rushdie the symbolist notes that the wife of the deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle was named Hope and that the Ministry of Culture goes by the acronym MINICULT. Rushdie the ironist observes that the campesinos battling "U.S. imperialism" dine to the radio accompaniment of Born in the U.S.A...
...were images "common enough to pass without notice." Hence the '50s-ish look of his paintings from the '60s, which, ironically, seem more nostalgic now than they did then. Unlike other pop artists with whom he was classed, such as Andy Warhol or Claes Oldenburg, * Rosenquist was not an ironist. "He rendered his blue-collar view of American things without mockery," writes Goldman, "with a deadpan literalness and a directness that suggested innocence...