Word: metaphor
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...most frustrating thing about Sweettable is that it contains the seeds of a good play--or several good plays, for that matter. Ribman never decided whether he was composing a metaphor for modern Europe, a guilty-secrets melodrama, a French philosophical play or an English drawing-room comedy. So he tosses elements of all these genres into his pot, and serves up the dramatic equivalent of broccoli cheese pasta--limp, stringy, with an occasional lumpy mass that may once have been a theme or plot twist now rendered unrecognizable by incompetent writing. Sweettable is talking-head drama of the worst...
What does all this leave to the imagination? What quarter remains for fantasy, for risque comedy or high melodrama? Do big-screen heroines engage in safe sex? Bisexuality was a popular metaphor in '70s entertainment, but it is hard to picture a film like Sunday, Bloody Sunday being made now. Its sexually ambivalent central character would clearly be a villain. Five years ago, Beyond Therapy, an amiable stage comedy about bisexuals, was well received in London, but audiences at screenings of the forthcoming movie version are uneasy with it. Even to blase sophisticates, bisexuality is becoming ethically questionable...
...central idea of the reform movement is a "new social contract" between government and welfare recipient. That concept is not just a vague metaphor: a project in California requires AFDC applicants to sign individual contracts pledging to return to school, enroll in training programs or look for jobs. The welfare-reform report that the National Governors' Association is expected to approve this month calls for making such a system nationwide...
Skarmeta, like Llosa, chooses a writer--Chilean poet-hero Pablo Neruda--as his protagonist. The lines vibrate with metaphor. Poetry intermingles with the text of the play in a way that emphasizes the living spirit of Neruda in the hearts of revolutionaries...
Light of Day, like many of Paul Schrader's scripts (Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Cat People), uses a strong, simple story to anchor a metaphor for social, familial or sexual relationships. But here he is so true to the characters' desperation that he deprives his film of the electric juice rock 'n' roll lends to much more routine movies. And he is so keyed into the cliches ordinary people use, both to express and to hide from their feelings, that he presses all irony out of the dialogue. This does pay off in two climactic hospital scenes where the raw exposition...