Word: mistressful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...name is Songlian (Gong Li), and she has just come to be the fourth concubine of the master (Ma Jingwu). The first mistress is old and irrelevant; the second is ingratiating, lethal, with "a Buddha's face and a scorpion's heart"; the third a saucily imperious opera singer. Each day the chamberlain will raise the red lantern in front of one of their houses, and that woman will be blessed with the master's favors. His strategy, supported by millenniums of male domination, is divide and conquer. So the caged princesses must play power games, with their rivals...
...pervaded the intellectual and street life of Paris in the 1890s. And in terms of sexual politics, the seedy, overheated rooms of Lautrec's brothels are not much different from the satin bower in which, rather more than a century before, Boucher painted the rosy buttocks of the royal mistress Miss O'Murphy. It's just that they smell more real, even as Lautrec takes his sardonic delight in aestheticizing them in a different way, as emblems of what the age called decadence...
...first as a director -- is that it never turns into a single act. Even the minor characters are sharply written. Dottie's kids are fully her equals in its structure, always giving as good as they get. Erica's the silent, watchful one. Little Opal's the pert mistress of the wise-child zinger. In fact, the film's two best passages belong to them. When Erica takes as her first lover the squarest boy in school (that'll show Mom), their struggle with the logistics of lovemaking is a fresh, sweetly hilarious exploration of familiar territory. And the girls...
American politics is so much danger and luck: gossip that George Bush had a mistress never damaged him during the 1988 campaign. Why not? Did the thought seem less plausible -- less imaginable even -- in Bush's case? Or did the monster just get bored and pass...
...course, an accumulation of sordid revelations has made J.F.K.'s Washington seem less like Arthur's Camelot than Capone's Chicago. J.F.K. himself, we know, was almost literally in bed with the Chicago Mob, sleeping with the godfather's mistress, for God's sake; his minions used Chicago mobsters as hit men against a rival head of state. He was enmeshed in sordid blackmail intrigues with Hoover; he was implicated in bugging King's bedrooms. Far from a noble peacemaker, he was a hawkish enthusiast for dirty tricks and covert ops, so Machiavellian that -- according to Michael Beschloss...