Word: motifs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Cubist, and the abstraction of his motifs goes on apace, though never at the expense of their sensuousness. His seascapes, mostly distilled from the coastal resort of Scheveningen, where a pier stuck out into the flat northern sea from the dunes, are of extraordinary beauty. The movement of waves and light is reduced to the twinkling of black bars and crosses, shifts and erasures, within an oval field of view. In the end, this breaking and reassembly of a motif go so far that only the barest clues to its identity remain--whether it is a tree, a seascape...
Eszterhas must be great at pitching stories, because the screenwriting craft eludes him. A mild gag here--the mispronouncing of Gianni Versace's name--is tortured into an endless motif. Nomi has a clouded past, but that doesn't explain why she is such a gratingly annoying creature. The giddiest moment in this All About Evil by way of 42nd Street comes when a club owner is asked whether the revue should close down because the star is out sick. "Not a chance!" he actually says. "The show goes...
...Bear hyperextends this motif. A creditor, Grigory (James O'Brien), visits the grieving maid, Elena (Mimi Huntington), to collect on a debt from her late fiancee--only to find she has no money. Inevitably the two turn to fighting each other as man and woman, the man swearing through his teeth that women are faithless and the spurned woman obviously holding a much stronger case...
...master of the memorable musical motif and the splash of orchestral color remains Williams, 63. From the ominous, if oft-parodied, "dum-dum, dum-dum" tune for the shark in Jaws (itself an homage to a theme from Hermann's Psycho) to the soaring melody of the mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Williams has a knack for creating the perfect musical counterpoint to the fantastic images on screen. "We all look up to him," says Kamen. "He invigorated the idea that the orchestra is the way to go when making film scores. He emphasizes the tonal...
...offspring of some monstrous union of bird and rodent. Over the years, legend has had it that bats are filthy and nasty (they feed on human blood) and that they possess spooky supernatural powers (they shift shape from bat to man). No wonder they have been a motif of countless horror tales and films...