Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...stick of kindling, a laketop as impenetrable as a cliff's face. The film is handled episodically, with a full fade to black between scenes. These pauses in the narrative slow the film down and thwart the efforts of audience members to gauge the pace or predict the plot. The moments of blankness, which Jarmusch describes as "respiration," also serve to showcase Neil Young's virtuoso soundtrack. Young has created a raw, wiry sonic complement to the film, as compelling as the visual elements and the plot. Jarmusch described Young's goal as creating a "melody" to go along with...
...amiably named Ray. The mystery of the stranger and the contents of the letter, however, gradually give rise to a series of colorfully existentialist and epistemological revelations, odd cultic rituals involving trousers and the moon, and a great deal of hemming and hawing over both. One could describe the plot--basically, Ray is actually a duplicate husband, mildly deviant, that William Hard must replace--but it is in essence less interesting, for all its gratuitous weirdness, than the atmosphere it engenders. In the play, Hard comes from the Land of Evening (named after a quote from Heidegger, no less); just...
...Avni, however, as Mad Wu, is saddled with a thankless job: with little place in the plot, or in the world, he arrives to serenade Dora with a relentlessly ironic lounge song about himself, his song and her. If there is something to frustrate the audience in this play--and there is much that is on the border between challenging originality and frustrating whimsy--it is his character. The self-conscious Other (he is a self-described "Chinaman" seeking to break stereotypes about homeless people), he mischievously implies with a quavering song that he is in on all the play...
Oliveira builds on the sexuality, religion and Faustian philosophy of the convent setting and tries to weave a new, intricate twist into the good vs. evil plot. But after 90 minutes of sparse dialogue, sparse interaction and even sparser coherence, "The Convent" ends with an inexplicable supernatural occurence--inexplicable in that it does not complete, expand or shed light on any previous theme. With its too frequent literary and biblical references and the overwhelmingly stark, gripping scenery, "The Convent" strives toward artsy epic but falls somewhere in the midst of artsy mediocrity...
...Also in December, Egyptian security officials uncovered a conspiracy by the extremist group Islamic Jihad to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak. Based on interrogations, which may have included torture, Egyptian authorities are now investigating an informant's tip that bin Laden helped fund the plot...