Word: paled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gene Wilder should be perfectly content to be Gene Wilder, but he persists in trying to be Mel Brooks. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, Wilder's first film as a director-writer-star, was a pale Brooks pastiche, and The World's Greatest Lover is more of the same. This is sad, for Wilder does have a fresh sensibility of his own to offer: here and there in his films one can find a sweet romantic streak and the beginnings of a surreal visual style. But Wilder refuses to trust his own instincts. Every time...
...scenery flats and starched aprons cannot mug for the audience or recite witty lines. Scenic and vocal delights pale when the direction is drab and comic potential ignored. Although the company's voices are strong and clear, they may as well be disembodied. The staging is sometimes pedestrian, and there is a peculiar reluctance to ham up the show...
...sneakers is missing. It was there in the morning. One of the dogs must have gotten to it. "Wait here," my brother tells me, and he sidles out the door. I wait. Within moments a dog begins to bark. Then another, then another. The house erupts. My pale-faced brother tears back into the room, and slams the door. "He's up." We spend the rest of the night huddled in our room. My sneaker is returned to me, with a chewed-off back...
...technology as HAL the computer has a lot going for it in the first place, so make those trips to the concession stand brief. The final 20 minutes are positively overwhelming as Kubrick hurls his wayward astronaut through a time warp that makes the color patterns of a kaleidoscope pale by comparison. One warning: don't wast too much time trying to figure out the significance of the monolith and some of the more obscure scenes in 2001; you can save yourself the trouble by reading screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke's book on the film if you are analytically inclined...
...more difficult to know what we are feeling: Balthus is a master of easing equivocation. His paintings are lifted by a tension between formality and obsessive eroticism. Balthus' nymphets, with their big heads, pale limbs and sidelong stares, are monsters in their way; they have the look of mutants, as young cicadas do when molting their husks. The most extreme case is Balthus' Guitar Lesson, 1934-one of the few masterpieces among erotic paintings made by Western artists in the past 50 years. But the suggestive mood pervades all his work except the landscapes. To encounter...