Word: motif
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...stock character. Alf and Charlie, two seedy English music hall singers and the only non-historical characters in the play, appear immediately after the overture and return periodically to personify the smug complacent attitude of Parliament and most of 19th century England toward the women's demands. Through the motif of 19th century music hall songs, they provide a constant mocking commentary on the women's efforts. Their theme song is a snide routine entitled, "A Woman's Place is in the Home...
THIS IS A FUNNY picture about Jews and Gentiles. Not a very original idea, but uniquely successful in this case, because director Elaine May and her daughter Jeannie Berlin work blithely yet subtly within the motif, transforming its simplemindedness into simplicity and its banality into unpretentiousness...
...most elaborate set pieces was the late-night Paris café, where all the customers got up to dance, spontaneously crowding the floor; Tango's lingering and desperate ballroom interlude gives the film its title. Bertolucci is smitten by dancing the way Hitchcock is obsessed by staircases. Each motif gives the director occasion to employ the best elements of his visual style in full flourish. Bertolucci's dancers are not only orchestrated to the movement of the camera, but seem to embody it. All of his films have an overriding feeling of gentle, gliding movement, a ceaseless choreography...
...film, set unspecifically near the turn of the century, recalls Bergman's National Theatre staging of Hedda Gabler. Here, as in that production, the dominant color motif is red of a dark, smothering, somehow vaguely menacing hue. "Don't ask me why it must be so because I don't know," Bergman writes in the Cries and Whispers screenplay. Perhaps it is because "ever since my childhood I have pictured the inside of the soul as a moist membrane in shades of red." Both Hedda Gabler and this film share, too, a careful choreography of movement, with...
...Christmas overdose of Wagner, try this chaser concocted by the crown princess of musical parody. As Miss Russell plays the piano and sings, her hilarious analysis of the Ring is based on the reasonable premise that the way to solve the crime (operatic especially) is to learn the motif. "The scene opens," she chirps, "in the River Rhine. IN IT!" The Rhine Maidens? "A sort of aquatic Andrew Sisters." Wotan? "The head god, and a crashing bore, too." The incestuous relationship between Sigmund and Sieglinde? "That's the beauty of grand opera, you can do anything as long...