Word: pallidly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DECAMERON Pier Paolo Pasolini, an avowed Marxist who makes pallid films of Christianity (The Gospel According to St. Matthew; Theorem), has taken on more than he can eschew. Using ten of Boccaccio's tales, Pasolini twits the church by showing lascivious nuns, self-mocking ghosts, corrupt priests and finally the trials of the painter Giotto, played by Pasolini himself. Giotto was a cornerstone of Renaissance painting; Pasolini plays him as an interior decorator. Boccaccio was famous for his ribaldry; Pasolini is notorious for his vapidity. To adapt the Decameron successfully, a film maker must come to his senses...
...first act of Loot was extremely funny; the equally clever machinations in act two seemed pallid and a bit too taciturn by comparison. This can be attributed to the dulling of one's ability to be shocked, when the same sort of ludicrous out-rage is repeated again and again. Sex and religion, which rank after death as targets of Orton's jesting, also reach a point of diminishing returns after the first machine-gun fire of jokes. Lines such as "God is a gentleman. He prefers blonds," or Truscott's "I wasn't expecting pharaohs" to Hal's cowering...
Another mighty playwright, Ibsen, offers an equivalent role for a woman in Hedda Gabler. The sad thing about the current off-Broadway revival is that the inner life that Claire Bloom brings to it is chilly, prim and pallid. The inner life is extremely important to Hedda, for otherwise what is left is the story of a kind of grown-up "bad seed," a woman who out of casual malice or native bitchiness burns her would-be lover's brilliant manuscript, pushes him back to drink and gives him a pistol with instructions to shoot himself...
...only did we fail to forge alliances, we could not even center on the issues around which we would struggle. The conflict lacked definition, and so the climax, and hence resolution, never even appeared. Gene, so pallid and pathetic after Bella's explosive challenge, mumbled on of Consequences and their Causes and Consequences being one. And smiled in appreciation of his own scholastic...
...exactly dissuade him, and he agreed to do the script himself. James Mason was cast as obsessive old Humbert Humbert, with Sue Lyon, then 14, in the title role of the stepdaughter who seduced him. Everybody said the adaptation could not be done, and they were right. But the pallid, bowdlerized film did gross about 21 times its $1,900,000 cost...