Word: leaning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Moreover, a fat lean must accompany any mission because Iran will need some $650 million to do an adequate job. Much of this would come from concession royalties, internal loans, and more efficient tax collecting; but for the rest, Iran would depend on the United States...
Oliver Twist is long (1 hr. 45 min.) and rich enough to spare the cuts. Directed by David Lean and produced by Ronald Neame, the British team responsible for 1947's superb Great Expectations, the movie recreates the novel's pungent brew of harshly realistic detail, extravagant melodrama, sordid depravity and sentimental warmth. Between the dreary, bare-brick expanse of the parish workhouse where Oliver begins life as an orphan and the elegant Brownlow mansion where he finally takes his rightful place, the settings and costumes summon up all but the smells of Britain's lower depths...
...Director Lean, who wrote the script with Stanley Haynes, has trimmed away some excess narrative, jettisoned a few minor characters, juggled a few incidents for dramatic effect, but salvaged much of Dickens' original dialogue. Yet Oliver Twist is more than an intelligent adaptation; it is a major creative effort by one of the few directors who has mastered his medium...
Unusually flexible in his cutting and camera movement, Lean has translated some of the novel's long passages (e.g., Oliver's birth and workhouse ordeal, Bill Sikes's remorse over the murder of Nancy) into virtually wordless sequences of visual storytelling at its imaginative best. He has molded most of his actors in the image of the Cruikshank drawings and handled them with the controlled flamboyance of Novelist Dickens himself. If any one threatens to outshine the others, it is Alec (The Cocktail Party) Guinness in the horrendous make-up of Fagin. To the character...
...Fables, Shaw has pulled himself together to add one more preface to his long and brilliant stock. It is entertaining, but not too entertaining to obscure the fact that perhaps the only things Shaw consistently believed in were himself and that lean deity, Creative Evolution, a sort of mixture of Lilith and Mrs. Sidney Webb. Apart from that he never made a joke which he did not sooner or later pass off as truth, and never stated a truth that he did not eventually turn into a joke...