Word: plot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rudolph's debut feature Welcome to L.A. deserves a couple of critics' stars on guts alone: he has consciously borrowed the impressionistic slice-of-life framework of Nashville and made it work with even less of a plot than Robert Altman's cinematic paradigm. Granted that the basically uncommercial quality of the format has been somewhat offset by the presence of a galaxy of New Hollywood actors; but from a strictly critical standpoint, Rudolph has effectively invited comparisons with his famous mentor that would seem to place his first major work at an almost fatal disadvantage. Yet Welcome...
...BEST WAY to see Hali is to go unprepared. Unlike most plays, it works directly on all your senses. The stage juts into the audience. Most of the impact of the drama is not put across through the lines and the plot, but through the beat of the music, the motions of the players, the colors swirling on the stage...
Without the dancers (June Kinoshita, Mira Nair, Maura Moynihan, Laurie Merrick) the plot would not hold together well, nor would it be as exciting. The dancers' movements are poetic, blending with the words and the music so thoroughly that they are inseparable. The different elements explain and express each other...
...plot is complicated and overgrown, including both sighing lovers and slapstick comedy, the latter provided by rustic laborers rehearsing an opera within this opera. The main weak point is the tendency for overlong recitative passages that stretch audience interest thin at times. The singing dialogues, however, especially the rustics', are splendid. In the end, after all the trials and tribulations of True Romance, there is a grand reconciliation when the status quo is restored. Good-humor and realism prevail over magic. At this point, the rustic laborers' comic rendition of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe is not only...
...fingers. She wrote "positively outrageous poetry" and she went around discovering poets, like Dylan Thomas, who were thought to be even more scandalous than herself. According to director Peter Sellars '80, Facade, "An Entertainment," the sparkling musical parody which William Walton wrote for Sitwell's poetry has "no plot, no characters." Then why did Sellars decide to stage this extravagant new production of poetry, puppetry, mime and dance and why did the Loeb (whoever is actually running it these days) decide to let him. "It was just irresistible," Sellars says. At its first performance in 1923, Facade caused such...