Word: madness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Reagan spoke first, and clearly from the heart. He inveighed against the "uncivilized nature" of mutually assured destruction (MAD), the doctrine of deterrence that has governed the superpower rivalry for more than two decades. He could not condone the notion, he said, of keeping the peace by threatening to blow up the world. We must, he implored Gorbachev, "find a better way." To the President, that meant reducing offensive weapons while seeking a transition to defensive weapons. He was quite conscious, he allowed, that Gorbachev sees a space defense system as simply a cover for achieving the capacity to wipe...
Like Rocky, the hunky mutant concocted by Mad Scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a creature spawned in countercultural obscurity and now deemed truly beautiful to behold. The film bombed so ignominiously in its 1975 American premiere that the distributor, 20th Century-Fox, was ready to give it up for dead. Ten years after, this polysexual rock-'n'-roll travesty has earned over $60 million at midnight box offices. But R.H.P.S. is more than a sleeper hit for insomniacs. It is a cross-generational phenomenon, an evocation of '50s monster movies wrapped in the anything...
...inclination to drag a blade across his jaw. Grab some rays at a tennis tournament and scrutinize the botanical shadow on Bjorn Borg's face. Take a trip down to the local triplex: Mickey Rourke, Timothy Hutton and Christopher Lambert are scruffing up the screen; Mel Gibson, as Mad Max, is atomizing his enemies; Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris are rounding up all those POWs and MIAs in Asia. It's a jungle out there, and when the enemy is lurking in the undergrowth, who's got time to worry about three days' growth...
...Manhattan previews, audiences giggled derisively through much of Revolution. A few saps (like the undersigned) were briefly moved by a three-minute close-up of Pacino fiercely nursing his son (Sid Owen) through some primitive Indian foot surgery. But then Kinski would launch into a furniture-smashing mad scene, or Donald Sutherland would drop by, a tuft of hair sprouting from his right cheek, and the toga-party roistering would recommence. If this reception is duplicated elsewhere. Revolution could achieve a dubious immortality as the campfire classic of 1986. --By Richard Corliss
Here is the effortless technique of Melba, formidable in the mad scene from a 1901 Lucia di Lammermoor. Here is the Italian tenor Emilio de Marchi, the first Cavaradossi, ringing the rafters with a triumphant Vittoria! in a 1903 Tosca. Here too is the white-hot French soprano Emma Calvé, a peerless Carmen; the Polish soprano Marcella Sembrich, who negotiates the Queen of the Night's treacherous coloratura con molto brio in a 1902 Magic Flute; and the soaring American soprano Nordica (née Norton), who must have been one of the most glorious Brünnhildes in history. And here...