Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...month ago. Yet the sun keeps setting on this tale of a clock tinkerer whose son turns terrorist. Phillipe Noiret is still quivering with emotion for two hours, and anything more has failed to materialize. Director Taverneir is content to focus on Noiret's face forever--who need dialogue, plot, or motivations? Apparently not Taverneir. Noiret has an occasional temper tantrum, which might in some circles pass for character development. We, however, are still not buying...
...play slows down in the second act as it fragments more and more. This is usually called "Second Act Trouble," and O'Donnell has it--his play and his plot stop moving and his characters stare at their feet and examine themselves. Tyler desperately grapples for Missy and she, not wanting to deal with new-realized realities of existence, squirms away from him. Otis finds his campers rebellious, and as vandals invade his property and ruin his rowboats this pathetic non-Prospero finds his dream dissolved, his charms overthrown; "what strength I have's mine own" is not very much...
Scapino retains only the barest skeleton from the Moliere play. A standard comedy plot (a pair of lovers, hidden identities, knowing rogues, fodish parents) is used as a jumping-off point for an evening of slapstick and mime. Scapino is a showcase rather than a play; its success depends on the comic talents of the actors in a show which has no pretensions to dramatic integrity. The script demands a veritable catalogue of comedy skills, ranging from stand-up routines to sexual sightgags to circus acrobatics...
...than Thoreau, Emerson, Parkman, Lowell, and Henry James combined was not a Transcendentalist. He was a Unitarian named "Holy" Horatio Alger Jr., so called because of his announced intention to follow his father's footsteps in the ministry. His 119 "rags-to-riches" novels--all with nearly the same plot--sold around 250,000,000 copies. No Harvard author to date has sold that many books...
...invite comparison, the characters emerge at first as anonymous voices: a crook prowling a seedy riverside district; an accountant who refuses to yield his house to a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood, an aristocratic woman who collects people like souvenirs. But, as the characters are unmasked with the gradually unwinding plot, each one's terror and terrorizing begins to look and sound more and more alike. Slowly, as in The Wasteland, the story dances itself into a nightmare at every corner where no meeting is accidental and every act compounds the anxiety it was meant to avoid...