Word: motif
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...cool but has a cool pickup truck. Rockford hates getting into fights, but when he does he always hurts his hand. Always. And he always gets punched in the gut. Rockford makes great use of his Phone-Mate, both in a practical way and as a motif for his show. All this is so so cool, so unbelievably cool. His best friends are Angel, an Hispanic con man, and Dennis, a policeman. Rockford knows Angel went to Brandeis and Dennis would rather be in New York working for Kojak, but he pals around with them anyway. It's the cool...
...That is all that's left when love is gone. Dancing...There is no love in this city...only discotheques." Dancing becomes the central motif of Holleran's book and his characters' lives, the all-important Yeatsian ceremony, the substitute liturgy. They dance at the Twelfth Floor of the Carlisle and in the Garment Center after hours and in Hackensack; they live for love, make careers of it, die from it. Like dervishes, they dance for God; but God is Frank Post's pectorals...
...soon after 1939, when he went to live in Cornwall. The mild light of the peninsula, sometimes as crystalline as the Aegean, and its rolling, antique contours of moorland and coast, recur in hundreds of drawings and dozens of still-life and land scape paintings. Nicholson's favorite motif was that of the cubist Juan Gris: a view of objects on a table, vases, mugs, jugs, bowls, with a fragment of landscape seen through an open window behind, the two worlds - exterior and interior - compressed into a single overlapping image. Nothing is gratuitous, nothing fudged. The sharp pencil line...
...abandoned-warehouse routine at the end doesn't even appear schematic (well, it does, but we're still scared to death). You gotta credit Alan J. Pakula though, who here, as in All the President's Men and the Parallax View, conveys the someone-is-always-watching-you motif with incomparable creepiness. Donald Sutherland is an intelligent, if pallid detective, but the protagonist is Jane all the way, the frustrated hooker trapped by the emotional and physical perils of her profession. Her best performance to date...
...support his wife and two children. Rogosin's camera-work starkly captures the cold hostility of Johannesburg; throughout the film there are shots of black and white workers moving, zombie-like, through the dreary streets of the city. These shots repeat throughout the film, setting a motif of alienation that reinforces the brutal racism depicted through Zach's travails...