Word: piquantly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...THESE," MARK MILLER URGES HIS WARY GUEST, proffering a handmade sausage stuffed with duck, fig and habanero chile. Miller watches with satisfaction as his quarry reacts to a fugue of piquant flavors that slowly fades to a smoky afterburn. "The chile pushes the flavor," explains Miller, who believes that good food should sing. "The duck fat is the low notes," he says. "The habanero is the high notes...
...Husbands and Wives -- the question of whether it contains clues to Allen's dumping Mia Farrow in favor of her 21-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn Farrow -- this is irrelevant, surely, to the noble trade of movie criticism. You want us to ponder weightier issues, like the piquant mise-en-scene in the oeuvre of a major auteur. Perhaps the entire review should be in French...
...parents -- fall in love, that is, with people who resemble them. It is also said that we repeat our parents' behavior. Children of alcoholics are more likely to be alcoholics; abused kids too often become abusing parents. In this case we can see, or at least surmise, some piquant re-enactments of unusual life stories...
Anyway, it stinks of calculation. The film -- about a Reno singer (Whoopi Goldberg) finding refuge from her gangster lover (Harvey Keitel) in a dilapidated convent run by staid Maggie Smith -- allows no room for irony, vagrant inspiration or air. There's something piquant about the look of Whoopi in a wimple, but the star must soar or sink with the vehicle, and this one is a bathysphere. Despite a nice turn by Kathy Najimy as a criminally chirpy nun and some inventive charts by ace arranger Marc Shaiman, Sister Act has corporate fingerprints smudging its smiling face...
...muse in the unexpected: an album of Latin salsa (1989's Rei Momo) and a mystical orchestral soundscape (last year's The Forest). Now Byrne has transplanted his rock roots into fertile tropical soil. In UH-OH (Luaka Bop), / released last week, jangling electric-guitar riffs alternate with piquant Caribbean rhythms, often in the same song, while Byrne aims his quirky intelligence at sex-change operations, domestic discord and even the Deity: "Well God can turn the world around/ And he can push it in the dirt/ And he can tear it all apart/ He don't care...