Word: manhattanization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...knocking on the wrong door anyway. What do people as privileged as Parrish and his family, at least as they are presented in Meet Joe Black, know about life? Mostly they are observed dressed to the nines, eating delicately prepared viands and enjoying life in either a Manhattan penthouse, where one prays the swimming pool does not spring a leak and ruin the library's first editions, or a riverside mansion, where the helicopter pad blends nicely into the landscape. There is no rage, pain or panic in any of these venues, and no wild laughter either. There are only...
...airy, glassy, geometric houses have caught on with stylesetters in the film and fashion worlds, who are buying up the old originals and restoring them. And the spare, functional furniture from the '50s has been getting so popular that upscale stores featuring it have sprung up in Manhattan's trendy meat-packing district and on the equally fashion-forward La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Ikea and Crate & Barrel have begun producing knockoffs for the mass market. The taste for things '50s-ish has also seeped into fashion (haven't you noticed all those sweater sets and pleated skirts...
Woody Allen's Celebrity tracks the former's possibly predictable fall and the latter's entirely unexpected rise within the tensely striving world of Manhattan's media and cultural demimonde. Since Branagh's performance (rather daringly) imitates Allen's anxiously stammering screen persona, and Davis is doing something she has done--expertly--for the writer-director before, playing a jilted, tilted woman, it may sound as if this is yet another of Allen's comically discordant chamber pieces about the impossibility of permanent connection between postmodern urbanites who think too much about themselves and feel too little for each other...
...From the Manhattan skyline to Woody driveling anxiety to his shrink, the first moments of Antz suggest a film destined to become another prototypical Woody Allen movie. Until Woody (now an ant named "Z") gets off the psychoanalyst's couch and walks into "The Colony." The makers of Antz seem particularly interested in demonstrating their ability to depict water and human movement, disregrading the fact that the plot must make some rather forced detours in order to accommodate these animated showpieces. Though the character of Allen as well as those of the other actors (voiced by Dan Akroyd, Anne Bancroft...
Back home in Manhattan he agrees to serve as president of "the Forty," an honorary association of artists whose aging members no longer find anyone younger worthy of filling vacancies left by the deceased. "If we don't ever manage to elect anybody," Bech lectures the group, "the institution will dwindle to nothing." Who would care? Not Bech's current mistress, Martina, who dismisses the Forty as "a bunch of mostly New York City has-beens electing themselves." Updike has one surprise for his beleaguered hero: the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature. Anyone who thinks this stunning recognition will...