Word: mozart
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cause and effect had been rescinded. In such a culture, to be obscure is by definition to be a failure. The obscure man asks bitterly, "Why is he famous, and not I? What's he got that I haven't got?" Manifestly, nothing. It is not the Salieri-Mozart configuration, mediocrity envying genius; today, let some unsung brilliant political thinker wonder why Dick Morris is famous for sucking a call girl's toes...
DIED. SIR GEORG SOLTI, 84, fierce maestro who prodded the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to the front of the world stage; in Antibes, France. During his conducting debut at the Budapest Opera, Solti's audience fled--not from his Mozart, but out of fear that Hitler, then in Vienna, was fast approaching. Never again. On the Chicago podium, he transfixed listeners, seemingly verging on levitation in his energetic efforts to draw tight phrasing and brilliant coloration from his musicians. His athleticism won the orchestra 23 Grammy Awards during his 22-year reign...
Contempt is hardly Godard's best or most evocative work, but it exposes his feelings for the seductive lie of movies: that "cinema replaces our gaze with a world in harmony with our desires" (the same line is quoted in For Ever Mozart). A French playwright (Michel Piccoli) is hired for a rewrite job by an American producer (Jack Palance) who has eyes for the writer's sexy wife (Brigitte Bardot). With its polyglot cast and mixed-doubles leering, Contempt gets the Babel and Babylon of filmmaking down perfectly...
...easy," says a woman in Mozart. "It's sticking a piece of metal in a piece of flesh." Moviemaking, though, is hard. Here a crew is in Sarajevo to film an adaptation of Alfred de Musset. The Bosnian war, its carnage everywhere evident, is reflected in the rancor of the filmmakers. An actress must try, hundreds of times, to say the word oui correctly; the accountant refuses to sign any more checks. At the end of the war, and the end of the century, are we near the end of our rope? One man thinks so. "When I look...
Toward the end of For Ever Mozart, a kid standing in line for the movie we have just seen hears the plot and says, "Let's go see Terminator 4." But Godard's films are worth seeing for his encyclopedic wit, the glamour of his imagery, the doggedness of a man who won't give up on modernism. His crabby films are, in truth, breathlessly romantic--because he keeps searching for first principles in the pettiest human affairs. Godard gazes at the intimate and finds the infinite...