Word: manic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Manic as Samaras' "transformations" are, they still possess a system and a history; his subverted objects have a common ancestor in Meret Oppenheim's surrealist icon of 1936, the fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon. Yet they are not mere footnotes to Surrealism. Samaras has a way of undercutting, or predicting, his more "mainstream" contemporaries; in 1961, for instance, he laid 16 square textured tiles flat on the ground, four by four, as a sculpture. In the Whitney, it looks like a waggish parody of Carl Andre's floor pieces-until you remember Andre's sculptures...
LIKE LINCOLN, Churchill was a manic depressive. There is no reason why film biographies cannot take the same strides that literary biographies have in the past years under practitioners like Erik Erikson and Richard Ellmann in regard to the interpretation of personality. Film biographies always show their subject in conflict with some external foe like the Boers or Lord Salisbury, but never in conflict with themselves. But to a Churchill freak like myself, any kind of visual stimuli is welcome which recalls a man whose abilities would put any post-war American politician to shame, particularly the current resident...
...rushes to a cemetery to steal his stone and starts fiendishly to sculpt. He pours sweat and blither in a steady stream of inspiration until the light of dawn the impossible stands before him--a revolutionary bus of Beauty Shaw of course, never shows up So the by now manic messiah carts his statue through a violent downpour to Shaw's gallery in the center of Paris and to a crescendo of stormy musak, he hurls his bust exultantly at the horrified faces behind the gallery glass...
...total being, while Butley is relentlessly analytical of other people and utterly blind to himself. This inhibits the playgoer's compassion. Maitland's experiences are a distillation of pain; Butley's, merely a concentrated display of panic. Nonetheless, there is considerable pathos in Butley, for his manic verbal foolery is the despair of a man who cannot afford the respite of silence...
Jason (Bruce Dern) lives like some sleazy sultan, complete with a harem consisting of an aging, manic coquette (Ellen Burstyn) and her empty-eyed stepdaughter (Julie Anne Robinson). He is a wheeler-dealer in shopworn dreams, an anxious scam artist with a line of patter that makes him sound like one of Eugene O'Neill's drummers. David, ever skeptical, eventually lets himself be suckered in, more to demonstrate a kind of desperate solidarity with his brother than anything else. The scheme is an old Staebler fantasy: take over an island called Tiki in the Hawaiian archipelago, build...