Word: metaphor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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TIME AFTER TIME refrains from making sociological statements, except to warn against the dangers of violence. "It's catching, like measles," says Wells in a typically charming metaphor. Charming sums up the film very well, with its well-acted quips and well-edited terror. And charm is a rare commodity these days, as antiquated as voluminous petticoats, and gentlemen's agreements, and faith that man can make the world a better place...
...images are so hypnotic, erotic and beautifully shot (by Vittorio Storaro) that we enter the movie's unpleasant milieu easily and remain captivated throughout. While the film is full of golden Parma landscapes, the dominant visual fixture is the moon: it is the film's metaphor for characters whose mysterious dark sides only gradually reveal themselves. In Bertolucci's brilliant climax, set at an open-air opera rehearsal, his artis tic conceits all converge. As the camera constantly shifts its point of view, we see that Luna 's events form a different drama-or opera-from...
...this third novel (after Last Night at the Brain Thieves' Ball and Preservation Hall) Spencer builds a model of emergent love pursued to its obsessive extreme. The author constructs his tale around an apposite metaphor, catastrophic fire. Seventeen-year-old David Axelrod sets some newspapers alight on the porch of his beloved Jade's house after her parents have forbidden him to see her for 30 days. He wishes to attract attention and instead nearly incinerates Jade, her brothers and parents...
...records mean record companies; Mistah Kurtz, he alive over at Warner Brothers. Record companies knew that the New Wave could be reduced to formulas and cranked out of the mill, that like everything else this exciting new music was susceptible to the process that had become a metaphor for the decade--cloning. They knew that they could sell overproduced pseudo-New Wave to most of its fans, artsy fartsy students with plenty of money and charge cards from Mom and Dad, ugly girls without taste or talent, nouveau hipsters who found Talking Heads "well, you kneu, so bizarre...
...second model is the metaphor of natural decay, the seasons of human life, for example. Animals, people, have birth, growth, periods of vigor, then decline and death. Do societies obey that pattern? The idea of decadence, of course, implies exactly that. But it seems a risky metaphor. Historians like Arnold Toynbee, like the 14th century Berber Ibn-Khaldun and the 18th century Italian Giovanni Battista Vico, have constructed cyclical theories of civilizations that rise up in vigor, flourish, mature and then fall into decadence. Such theories may sometimes be too deterministic; they might well have failed, for example, to predict...