Word: moralizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...humanitarian agencies to come to the rescue." But as a French government official asks, "Who is going to take the responsibility for saying 'All right, now we're going to stop all aid. Finished. Not one more sack of flour'? At that point, you've reached the political and moral limits of the debate...
...costly, screwed-up solution that benefits the least amount of people, and we'll do it in a spectacular way." But just how much real choice is there? "The ethic is an absolute one," says Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings Center, a New York-based institute that studies moral issues. "The price of not providing aid is a basic denial of humanity, far greater than the possible political damage. It may indeed help a corrupt and totalitarian regime, but you cannot ignore the fundamental necessity of life." So as the West wonders whether it should bail out that infuriating...
...subjects of his art include Egyptian legends, alchemy, the Cabala, the Holocaust, the story of Exodus, Napoleon's occupation of Germany, Albert Speer's architecture, the mythic roots and Nazi uses of German romantic imagery -- dark woods, lonely travelers, ecstatic moral conversions in the face of nature -- and much more besides. Among Kiefer's spiritual heroes are Richard Wagner, Frederick II, Joseph Beuys, Painters Arnold Bocklin and Caspar David Friedrich and Novelist Robert Musil. Kiefer is not an artist of ordinary ambitions. But his ambitions are not bound up in the cult of celebrity that has riddled the art world...
...work is a ringing and deeply engaged rebuke -- clumsy sometimes, and bathetic when it fails, but usually as pictorially brilliant as it is morally earnest -- to the ingrained limitations of its time. It sets its face against the sterile irony, the despair of saying anything authentic about history or memory in paint, and against the general sense of trivial pursuit that infests our culture. It is a victory for the moral imagination...
Streep is always entertaining to watch, even when, as here, she looks like a debutante holidaying among the homeless. Both she and Helen are, after all, Vassar girls, and she bears herself with the shambling dignity of a gentlewoman trying to maintain moral equilibrium while on the skids. But Streep's role is small. Nicholson must carry the film, and it is no fair burden. In one or two other films, this sexy, daredevil performer has renounced his star quality, tamped his radiance, sat on his capacious charm, as if this were a higher form of acting...