Word: phrasings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hide itself behind its silver screens, and the news from the Coast was usually good. People were dancing out there. And singing. And repenting. During the war, though, a whole new style of movie started skulking out of the Coast. The French labelled it film noir, but coining the phrase was about as close as Gallic sensibilities could ever get to it. No Frenchman could truly understand a city like L.A., and that, metaphorically at least, was what film noir was all about. The term was used to describe a slew of films, the likes of Double Indemnity...
...fact, I have never advocated anything of the kind. What I have stated on numerous occasions is that Soviet leaders, having formulated a war-fighting nuclear strategy, consider nuclear superiority desirable. Then, in response to the question on what "nuclear superiority" meant, I answered with the phrase you cite: "Convincing your opponent you are willing to use this force." This is the view of Soviet leaders, as rendered by me, not my own opinion...
Novelists of intrigue like to base their works on those who, in T.S. Eliot's phrase, are "much possessed by death/ And [see] the skull beneath the skin." Martin Cruz Smith reverses the process. His hero takes a skull and, with the aid of an ethnologist, builds a face around it, the way Peking man was constructed from shards of bone. A woman's identity rises from the remains, and her murderer is traced. Here Smith wrings another change: his hero is an open-faced Soviet investigator, and his villain is a voracious capitalist, the American John Osborne...
...John Garfield and Lana Turner to concentrate on a purposefully paced retelling of Cain's story. It means to calibrate every movement in the desperate mating dance of Frank and Cora, "these unspeakably stupid, very simple people, filled with guile and tenderness." That is Director Rafelson's phrase, spoken without contempt for his characters but with an understanding of their selfish, consuming needs. Though Nick's café is just a short drive from Hollywood, Cora knows the only spotlight she is likely to appear in is the concupiscent glare from men across the counter. Frank knows...
...spirit bringing three instruments into unison. Each man is sensitive to the varying moods of his two companions: if one shows signs of interpreting the piece in a special way, the other two pick up on it and follow his lead. "The raising of an eyebrow, the way a phrase is constructed," explains Greenhouse, "can tell us what will come next. Often we are able to understand the ideas going through our colleague's mind even before he does himself...