Word: paean
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GINIA BELLAFANTE'S PAEAN TO THE PRESENT Hollywood crop of young actors, ``Generation X-Cellent'' [Cinema, Feb. 27], devastatingly illustrates the debasement of currency in talent and beauty of today's actresses compared with their counterparts of the 1930s and '40s. Can the dim-bulb performance of Marisa Tomei in Only You (1994) stand up to Carole Lombard's luminosity in My Man Godfrey (1936)? How can Winona Ryder, Uma Thurman, Sarah Jessica Parker and Drew Barrymore compete with Rita Hayworth's Gilda, Gene Tierney's Laura, Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa in Casablanca and Merle Oberon's Cathy in Wuthering...
...number of movies dealing explicitly with the subject have received both critical and popular acclaim. They include Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Mrs. Doubtfire. An upcoming Patrick Swayze vehicle, will soon join their ranks. Inexplicably, the current video by a mainstream adultcontemporary pop singer, Gloria Estefan, is a paean to the thrills of crossdressing. Consequently, increased exposure to the practice means that the traditional, instinctive reaction to many public male-to-female cross dressers, usually one of laughter coupled with spasms of revulsion, has changed to one of, if not obliviousness, then almost casual acceptance...
Christopher J. Crick is an awkward Rinuccio, gamely waving his arms. His roseate idealism is undermined by the outright mockery of his family. The production requires greater nuance here--the Donati should be skeptically indulgent of his lovesick earnestness. His paean to Florence, "Firenze e come un albero fiorito," is somewhat stilted, and his voice is strained in the upper register...
Granted it was too sanctimonious and too long, but Ken Burns' 18-hour paean to the national pastime was a gigantic achievement nonetheless, packed with history, nostalgia and, yes, poetry. Burns (The Civil War) was too much in love with his subject, but could anyone else have got this made, or made it so well...
...during the beauty contest's final, brief Q&A that Miss Alabama, 21, performed her most moving feat. She answered a question. Her voice was a bit fluty and her consonants soft, but the college junior clearly understood Regis Philbin's query about self- realization; and her reply, a paean to belief in oneself, was obviously deeply felt. Minutes later, when Heather Whitestone, who is deaf in one ear and has only 5% hearing in the other, won the 74th annual Miss America Pageant, she didn't realize it until her runner-up pointed to her. Then she burst into...