Word: leans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Life Is Not an Epic. When David Lean died, did he take the secret of epic movies with him? Lean knew that life is full of dramatic events, but it's what's inside that counts; the enthralling vistas matter less than the interior vision. That lesson is lost on Hollywood, whose idea of epic biography is a story of a big shot (Gandhi, Bugsy Siegel, Malcolm X) who got shot. Violent death is meant to lend tragic grandeur...
Hence Hoffa, an utterly externalized view of the corrupt, crusading boss of the Teamsters, James R. Hoffa. The R stood for Riddle, and David Mamet's lean script is content to leave him at that. Hoffa does stuff -- bullies management, connives with the Mob -- but who is he? The movie gives not a clue. Jack Nicholson looks eerily like his subject, and he has the abrupt gestures and staccato voice of a man who overcomes lack of eloquence by force of will. But director Danny DeVito, who also plays Hoffa's closest ally, gets way too fond...
...industrialized nations. William Thorsell, editor in chief of the Toronto-based Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, pointed out that Canada is enjoying record merchandise exports to the U.S., a performance that is likely to improve further with the recent weakness of the Canadian dollar. Canada is becoming lean and productive, he said, predicting that "we could have by mid- decade a strongly reviving economy...
Filmed in Vietnam, Malaysia, Switzerland and France, covering 155 minutes of screen time and 30 years of convulsive history, Indochine sprawls and enthralls. It has the breadth and intelligence of the David Lean epics from whose plots it borrows: the juggling of passion and politics in Doctor Zhivago, the muddle of racial emotions in A Passage to India, the grandiose failure of colonial outsiders in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. But Indochine's vision is essentially feminine; its ample grief is that of a mother mourning her lost children in a land shifting and receding...
...anyway, just for the challenge. On a T-bar, you don't sit on the upside-down wooden T that gives the lift its name. If you just kind of lean, you'll get a gentle ride up the hill. If you sit down, you'll fall, and the people behind you will fall as they try to get out of your way. People have died...