Word: pageants
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Usually, it is only from the safety of retrospect and an established self that we entertain ourselves with visions of an alternative life. The daydreams are an amusement, a release from the monotony of what we are, from the life sentence of the mirror. The imagination's pageant of an alternative self is a kind of vacation from one's fate. Kierkegaard did not really mean he should have been a police spy, or Nixon that he should have been a sportswriter. The whole mechanism of daydreams of the antiself usually depends upon the fantasy remaining fantasy. Hell...
...characters to quirky behavioral life, but every reaction shot, every unfinished phrase or repeated sentence means that many moments stolen from the Doctorow overview. Forman has taken as gospel the novel's epigraph-Scott Joplin's admonition, "It is never right to play ragtime fast"-reduced a pageant to an anecdote, and sacrificed sweep for nuance. Grateful as one is to have this Ragtime, with its many thrilling performances and its spurts of emotional grandeur, one would now like to see the adaptation Altman might have made. And after that, if you please, the silent version. -By Richard...
...main story and one subplot-Coalhouse Walker's rise to notoriety and Evelyn Nesbit's career as America's first sex goddess-and only glances at or ignores the rest. By taking 155 minutes to tell less than half of Doctorow's 270-page pageant, Forman and Weller have created an impressive but strangely lopsided movie...
...much gossip is retailed merely for the enjoyment of the exchange, the simple human interest in the passing pageant of follies, it also has subtler purposes. Gossip-which concerns people, while rumor concerns events-is usually an instrument with which people unconsciously evaluate moral contexts...
Royalty should play royalty, even in a pageant as pedestrian as this. Writer-Director Steven Gethers sketches a triptych of scenes from the life of young Jacqueline ("Not Jackie," as she firmly cautions). At first she is a solemn young equestrian, a pawn in her parents' grim power struggle for her love. Later, she is a budding journalist and the apple of Senator Jack Kennedy's roving eye. The film climaxes with the White House years, when she plays Guinevere in a contentious Camelot, acting as Jack's shy, willful, loving wife and then as his elegant...