Word: muchness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...people don't ask for much--enough food, adequate shelter and a mildly entertaining Oscar-night show that gets us to bed before sunrise. Hollywood, in all its benevolence, is hard at work on granting us the latter. The producers of next year's Academy Awards show, husband-and-wife team Lili and Richard Zanuck, made a public plea this month to intermittent emcee BILLY CRYSTAL, who last year ceded the hosting duties to Whoopi Goldberg. "It's the one thing people agree on--they all want Billy," said Lili (kindly refraining from adding, "just not in any more...
...mostly in southern Italy, Minghella's tantalizing movie captures the pulse, temperature and texture of the idle rich at play and the yearning of Ripley, who wants that good life so much he'd kill for it. Inhabiting this very dolce vita is a quintet of smart-looking young performers--Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jack Davenport--giving vigorous life and fine shading to roles of wealth or breeding. They parade their star quality (or supporting-actor quality) not by screaming and cussing Method style but by radiating an unforced glamour that recalls Hollywood...
Highsmith described The Talented Mr. Ripley as being about "two young men with a certain resemblance--not much--one of whom kills the other and assumes his identity." In the novel, Tom Ripley, an orphan in his mid-20s with a gift for larceny and mimicry, is hired by a rich shipbuilder to go to Mongibello, an Italian resort village where the man's son Dickie Greenleaf (played by Law in the new film) has been idling, to try persuading the lad to return home to the family business. Tom agrees, sails to Europe and, on seeing Dickie, is dazzled...
...Ripley novels are slack, ungainly; Ripley is more prey than predator. But the first three (recently issued in a hardcover omnibus by Knopf/Everyman's Library) have the tone of high, dark comedy. Tom kills--Dickie, Dickie's pal Freddie Miles, an American art lover, a bunch of mafiosi--as much for the game of eluding capture as for motives of profit or survival. In Ripley's Game he gets an ailing man involved in a murder plot only because the man once spoke abruptly to Tom. Then, when the man desperately tries to kill a Mafia goon, who shows...
...itself around an almost punitively observed decorum. He must have felt he was a great painter, but his life's struggle was to establish himself as a great gentleman. No court was more hedged with exact signs and symbols of degree than that of the Spanish monarchy. Velazquez spent much of his adult life lobbying, campaigning, espaliering the family tree and sucking up to the noblesse in order to be granted the red cross of a Knight of Santiago; it meant more to him than any picture--whereas to us it means nothing, except as evidence of a great artist...