Word: mordant
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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BELLE DE JOUR. Aging but still arch, Spanish Director Luis Bunuel has filled this piece of baroque pornography about the obsessive fantasies of a young housewife (Catherine Deneuve) with some of his most mordant jokes and anticlerical broadsides...
Lifetime Diary. Instead, he made a name for himself with The 400 Blows, a title derived from a French slang expression "faire les 400 coups," meaning "to go on a spree." The movie told the mordant story of a disintegrating childhood that was half autobiography and half poetry. Truffaut later observed that "a director's total work is a diary, kept over a lifetime." This first entry revealed hints of the style that was to follow: despair that could add up to an affirmation of life, poignance that never stooped to self-pity, Mack Sennett farce that could dive...
...DEAD. Beckoned to Elsinore they know not why, Tom Stoppard's neo-Elizabethan protagonists wander through historical events looking for significance and through their lives in search of identity. John Wood, Brian Murray and Paul Hecht share with the audience each nuance of meaning, each streak of mordant...
Mailer evokes some marvelously mordant closeups of his fellow "weekend revolutionaries" as they try to do their ritualistic protest thing quickly, so that they can get back to New York for a dinner party. "Lowell's shoulders had a slump," writes Mailer. "One did not achieve the languid grandeurs of that slouch in one generation-the grandsons of the first sons had best go through the best troughs in the best eating clubs at Harvard before anyone in the family could try for such elegant note." Ideologue Paul Goodman "looked like the sort of old con who had first...
Nothing Heroic. Where others have seen only romance, adventure and folksy humor, Fiedler's hawk eye spots paradox, irony and mordant wit. Hence Pocahontas is "our first celebrated traitor to her own race ... a model long in advance of Uncle Tom." Hannah Duston is not the heroic protector of white womanhood and the family but the great castrating mother of all men-a Mary Worth in linsey-woolsey. The tale of Rip Van Winkle is really about booze as a weapon against women. Only Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook make it through Fiedler's gauntlet without lumps. They constitute...