Word: mask
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Faye Dunaway literally withers away before the camera's eye, becoming merely a living mask of death by the story's conclusion. It's a touching performance, but one wonders if an actress of Dunaway's magnitude is required to deliver it. Daniel Blank (David Dukes), the killer who strikes concurrent with her periods of medical crisis, suffers periodic fits that make him prowl the city, striking down victims with a particularly vicious mountain climber's icepick. Yet here too is caricature--the screenplay never sufficiently explains the root of his troubles, nor why he feels compelled to shave...
...reach down into your darkest urges. With a look and a walk she evokes the thematic center of Wedekind's play: the awesome power of dawning libido. And Courtney Vance is universally excellent in all four of his roles, but particularly in the end, as the Man in a Mask, the Great Father who has come to save Melchior and his dismal world...
...rococo garden, look like large pale dolls haunting an artificial landscape. Confidence came with his absorption of the grand manner. With access to the big houses, the young painter could see the work of Rubens, Van Dyck and Claude. He rapidly learned to deal with the social mask. Those pink, smooth, patrician egg faces, the men a little knobbly of jaw and hooded of eyelid, with their "cold pleasant stares" (as Henry James would say of the English gentleman) are emblems of sensibility and composure, not of emotion. Now and again a very slight hint of irony seems to intrude...
...black, and coffee/Though quite a few were chary, more were bold/Some took it like the Host, some like a toffee/The two or three who wept were soon consoled."). Amis is an able versifier, but he seems dispassionately distant, the outsider looking through the window--noticing death behind the carnival mask of sex, say, then shrugging smugly and moving along the sidewalk...
...their opening days, much of the B-52's act has been visual, as they try to mask their disjointed live performances with outrageous outfits, wild stage antics, and a jaded, hedonistic style. Timing and musical clarity fused to make their music danceable--simple riff followed simple riff and their lines of action were both easy to follow and easy to latch onto. Crisp, clear, and minimal, it was all a matter of a weird note at the right time...