Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...work is a series of one-liners, and these depend for their effect on what all one-liners need: a punch, a certain concision. Without that, they straggle. Told in outline, the plot--if you can call it that--of his short film Fashions sounds at least notionally amusing. A fixed camera stares at a rather mannish-looking model standing on a turntable, wearing an outfit of Ray's design. She revolves once, and then we cut to the same model wearing a different dress. There are about a hundred of these changes in the course of the 12 minutes...
...movie has enough plot (by Carter and Frank Spotnitz) to stock a half-season of shows. Let's see...a virus from aliens has been harvested and is about to be spread, by bees and corn oil, across the world--"a plague to end all plagues," whispers kook-savant Dr. Alvin Kurtzweil (Martin Landau), who spends most of his time hiding in a fetid back alley hoping Mulder will show up. The aliens, you see, were earth's original inhabitants, and they are being tracked by that all-round evilest of government conspiracies, FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency...
...dictionary." Although Deane himself uses a sufficient number of twentyfive-cent words to be considered a "literary" author, for whatever that's worth, his style is as down-to-earth as any country boy's. His lovely prose reads effortlessly. Another writer would drown such a tenuous, fragile plot with the dense description Deane favors, but Deane makes observations like "a pulse passes up and down from my head to my toes as though someone had slashed me from behind" or "the armchairs on either side of the fire [were] now mute and emptied of all confidences in the whitened...
...film from first-time writer-director Lisa Cholodenko, certainly aims high but still isn't quite art. In fact, who knows what to make of a film whose primary virtue, together with the quality of its acting, is the scale of its ambition, yet which grows in plot and theme more and more critical of ambition? This narrative dilemma, rather than weakening Cholodenko's film, actually gives it structure and power, sustaining High Art through occasional lapses in its storytelling and making of it an intriguing if not wholly successful picture...
...four songs, by Matthew Wilder and David Zippel, propel the plot with lyric efficiency. But then, at the end, the racy Eddie Murphy spirit that has been held in check during the film explodes with a Motownish rave-up, True to Your Heart, that cascades over the closing credits. The song doesn't have much to do with the girl-power theme of this briskly enchanting film, but it's a perky parting gift from the Disney folks. The R.-and-B. group 98[degrees] and Stevie Wonder trade harmonic and harmonica riffs with some sassy horns, and euphoria saturates...