Word: paradoxes
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Film biographies tend to fall victim to a similar paradox. Ideally, a film biography should be historically accurate, entertaining, and provide some critical insight into its subject. There is an obvious tension between these three elements, and few directors and screenwriters are able to achieve the delicate, necessary dynamic. Indeed, most directors opt for one of the goals--usually that of producing an entertaining film--and address the other two only cursorily, if at all; while entertaining, the results of such efforts are little more than loosely-based fictional treatments. Diana Ross was wonderful to watch and hear in Lady...
Biographer Robert Lacey's task is to relate the woman who happens to live in Buckingham Palace to this "flourishing of the British constitutional monarchy"-one of the more "curious social phenomena of the 20th century," as he rightly observes. It is no easy job, and the word paradox gets used freely. In the end, Lacey, the author of a biography of Sir Walter Raleigh (and a staffer on the London Sunday Times), has spread his cloak over the puddle and gallantly invented a second Elizabeth to walk across it. If this act of prestidigitation is not a work...
Still, nothing can keep the portrait from coming out a negative. Her Majesty's surest instinct is for what is not done; her habitual expression is the absence of an expression. Her strength, Lacey is driven to argue in an ultimate paradox, is "the absence of a forceful . . . personality...
...amusing paradox is the concern among Chicano students, a la the newly rich, with their news media and public image and their own stereotyping of themselves into roles of the oppressed. Yes, yes: Oppression! Repression! Fascism! Racism! I thought I'd left that behind in the Sixties and early Seventies...
...Clara and her prince. But there is no Sugar Plum Fairy and the cast is entirely adult. Clara, danced by Marianna Tcherkassky, hovers somewhere between child and woman. Her godfather Drosselmeyer, brilliantly portrayed by Alexander Minz, is both fatherly and aboil with suppressed eroticism. Baryshnikov accents mystery and the paradox of the light and dark faces of the human soul. Stage Designer Boris Aronson's huge painted panels and fantasy murals form a surreal backdrop for the enchanted events of the ballet...