Word: orders
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...city. The story revolves around a sales contest, initiated by the real estate agency at which all the characters are employed. The vicious competition that ensues culminates in crime and betrayal as the agents manipulate each other in a struggle to climb to the top of the office pecking order...
...famous for the fast-paced, in-your-face language that Mamet prefers to call "poetry" rather than realism. Ruiz directs his cast according to Mamet's concept of "practical aesthetics," which emphasizes intention and reaction. The actor's mind must work quickly, switching from one tactic to another in order to get what he wants. Although there are moments where the actors seem to lose the freshness of the moment, they manage to conjure up the intense and dynamic interaction that the aesthetic requires...
...characters are constantly rising up and down like the figures they so jealously keep track of on a chalkboard - struggling to gain power, reveling in their moment of glory, only to come crashing down a moment later. It is a world where men suppress their own humanity in order to become the "machine" - the ideal businessman - cool, collected, always closing a deal. It's a ripped contract. It's life...
...movie. Or maybe, as this reviewer starts to note with some dread, it is something else altogether: a critique of the American judicial system even up to the 1990's, where the hand-in-hand complicity of police and the justice system prevents Carter's release from prison in order to cover up police corruption in New Jersey. With dizzying rapidity, Jewison now whips up righteous lawyers who passionately rail against the judicial system as well as shady police officers who threaten the three Canadians who decide to rally to Carter's cause. And as if we weren't more...
...Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin writes that the body of the filmed subject "loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence. The projector will play with his shadow before the public." Shimon Attie's work, currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, is premised on such shadowplay, but with profoundly moving results...