Word: plot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Carefully, constructedly cool, Quartett takes the complex, bulky plot of the novel and pares it down to two actors who alternate personalities and sexes with cheerless machination in a game of sex and vengeance. Winsome Brown as the Marchioness, Merteuil, plays her role with bloodthirsty relish. Her obvious confidence and professionalism enable her to add the strain of comic self-consciousness that brings the play to life. Brown moves in tightening circles around Tom Hopkins as Valmont, the lethargic predator turned prey. Hopkins' Valmont is charming and at times strikingly perverse. On the other hand, the interaction between these...
...stupidity in renting a van under his own name, presenting a valid New York driver's license with a real and traceable phone number and, instead of disappearing after the bombing, calling attention to himself by repeatedly trying to recover the deposit. Such behavior seemed to indicate that the plot was a wildly amateurish -- though horribly successful -- operation...
...meditation and macrobiotics. The sexual precocity of the female lead's 12-year-old daughter feels contemporary. Yet the sonorous music and often sentimental lyrics seem straight from the '50s. This mishmash makes it harder to swallow the contrived meet-cute start and melodramatic career twists of the plot...
...just mirror tough; it sneaks a glance at itself too often, likes what it sees too much. Quinn, the hero, is supposed to be a stressed-out investigative reporter; and since this is Los Angeles, he's got a bigfoot Jeep with a camo paint job (there's a plot, but first things first) and a drop-dead Japanese-American photog girlfriend who wears cowboy boots with little chains on them. The bad guys include an old- time movie cowboy with a political itch and an aging football hero who < likes to hurt people. Their meanness is actorish...
...given to portentous evocations of myth, an obsessive juggler of the duality between head and heart, reason and inspiration, ordered restraint and exalted excess. Of course the same plays, viewed from another angle, make a strong case in Shaffer's favor. He is intensely theatrical, intellectually provocative, inventive with plot and setting despite the single-mindedness of his themes -- in short, entertaining and fascinating even at his most over...