Word: motif
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...lizardly Gekko is a potential father figure for sly Fox; the other is Bud's dad, a working-class hero who is a mechanic at the small airline that Gekko may soon devour. The elder Fox is played by Charlie Sheen's own dad Martin; and to complete the motif, Stone has dedicated Wall Street (as he did Salvador) to his stockbroker father, who died two years ago. The entire film is in fact a ferocious meditation on the dilemma of a son choosing his father. Which one will Bud emulate: the noble failure or the triumphant sleaze...
...Sondheim and a longtime friend, Actor Anthony Perkins, to turn out their own Hollywood chiller, The Last of Sheila. Equally methodical for the stage, Sondheim does not simply write songs; he writes scores so intricately interconnected that he began Into the Woods by jotting down a musical motif for each character, as if planning a narrative symphony. He couples that architectural approach to music with a detached, almost anthropological look at his fellow man. He derives many of his lyrics from probing conversations with actors or friends. Yet even people who have been close to him for decades...
Autobiographical tidbits reinforce the motif. Michael Dukakis tries to overcome a bookish mien by telling a TV audience that he ran a "pretty credible 57th" in the 1951 Boston Marathon and was "always out on the ball fields and playing fields." Albert Gore in most speeches cites his Army service in Viet Nam. Bruce Babbitt, who has pedaled his ten-speed across Iowa and climbed a mountain in New Hampshire, is described in one of his TV commercials as "coming from a frontier family that lives by simple truths...
Writers have often thought of the Constitution in nautical terms, a motif probably suggested by the image of the ship of state. In 1857 Macaulay told an American, "Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor." (A foreigner's elegant remark. Others suspect that the Constitution has entirely too much anchor -- too many checks and balances -- to make any headway at all.) The sociologist David Riesman likens the Constitution to the shallow keel of the national ferryboat, on which the passengers keep shifting from port to starboard and back again. One might also suggest the image of a trimaran...
...Harbison. His music is approachably tonal without being obvious; a Harbison tune is less a hummable melody than a strongly profiled motif designed to forward the musical argument, not seduce the ear. His structures are sturdy,his orchestration is crisp and clean. Yet this is not the dread "Princeton School" music of baleful repute, the arid note spinning that often characterizes the works of Ivy League composers like Milton Babbitt. Harbison, who as a teenager played jazz piano and who at Harvard led the Bach Society Orchestra, is an academic with a heart...