Word: ornamental
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...purely naturalistic. All the figures in his dismal urban landscape carry a carefully calculated moral weight, and their story is clearly intended as a microcosmic portrait of contemporary English life. So call it, perhaps, a fable on the sneak. And call it something else too: yet another carefully handmade ornament of the new British cinema, which includes such small recent marvels as My Beautiful Laundrette; Rita, Sue and Bob Too; Withnail and I and Wish You Were Here...
...this year is all but bereft of emotional force. At the finale, two actresses stand rigid, their cheeks glazed with tears, yet much of the audience reacts only with uneasy titters. Director Steven Berkoff's highly stylized script and direction circle around the story, adding layer upon layer of ornament, when what is needed is a clean, quick cut to the emotional core of an incident as simple as it is mysterious...
...wearing chains with what I thought was the peace symbol. I thought, how interesting that these young men, living in such difficult circumstances, would still be concerned about such issues as world peace. And then I came to realize that these weren't peace symbols -- they were the hood ornament from a Mercedes. And they knew everything about a Mercedes, how much it cost, how fast it would go. They knew Mercedes as the car of choice of the drug dealer. Money, greed, reaches all through society...
...easy on the ears, with reverberations that jangle provocatively in a moviegoer's memory. But the violent mood swings Demme programmed into films like Melvin and Howard and Something Wild often kept viewers at a bemused remove. And once or twice Pfeiffer has been stuck in films she could ornament but not inform. This time, though, these two and a gang of co-stars have created a coherent farce symphony...
...also has multiple amusing moments, usually when Tad Allagash is in tow. In one particularly funny scene, the pair release a vicious ferret in the office of Jamie's former boss while the fiction editor who has rejected his stories falls flat-on-his-face drunk before an armor ornament. And all of Jamie's forays into the Manhattan night are funny in their pathetic way, and this is precisely the sort of humor that...