Word: peculiarities
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...glimpse into an American childhood world the "Brady Bunch" et al wouldn't even allow in their outtakes. Still, the humor that might make Bad Manners more than just a fun night out with yourself disappoints in the end. Filmed in under backing, it sports an uneven quality peculiar to low-budget Hollywood. If Bobby Houston follows through with plans to offer a second with a larger budget, Bad Manners II could retain its humor and develop into the better movie it often hints at. But then you'd probably have to take someone along to see that movie...
...PECULIAR and insular category of literature known as "Harvard novels," prepare to add another to the sub-group of books about Radcliffe. Superior Women is representative of the genre but somewhat better because Alice Adams '46 appears to have no pretensions about her aims. Early on, the 'Cliffies recognize their resemblance to the typical group of girls who inhabited certain novels of the 1940s. And certainly they're stereotypical enough--the problem is that, whether Adams intended it or not, they never quite manage to become more than that...
...Antonio Salieri, the 18th century Italian composer whom Peter Shaffer resurrected in fictional form for his 1979 play Amadeus, one peculiar genius was even more frightening: a precious gift and a malicious joke from God. The creature's name was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart-"Spiteful, sniggering, conceited, infantine Mozart!" as the play's Salieri, his contemporary and rival, calls him. "I had heard a voice of God," the Italian mutters after listening to a Mozart adagio, "and it was the voice of an obscene child!" Salieri carried a double curse: to appreciate beyond pain or pleasure Mozart...
...back. (It is only those living in utter despair who choose a drug like heroin that takes you there for good: they are seeking not to holiday, but to emigrate.) The spirit of the psychic holiday was uncannily captured by Steven Spielberg, when he called Michael Jackson's peculiar child fantasy world (Disney dolls, cartoons, asexuality) a place where "I wish we could all spend some time." Living there, like living in New York, being another matter altogether...
...does it with a peculiar combination of ambisexual eroticism and self-mythologizing. Until Purple Rain, Prince played at being a prisoner of sex who craved a life sentence. Some of his song titles sounded like cuts on a Pigmeat Markham party record (Head, Soft and Wet). If there was a unifying theme to his lyrics-indeed, a governing obsession-it was that carnal knowledge is the ultimate wisdom. Party till you drop, make out till you molder: self-realization through rutting...