Word: poignant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ironic commentary. A Bible teacher tries to engage a group of handicapped children in his lesson, but most seem as oblivious to it as they are to the TV set that drones forlornly in the school's recreation room. Yet Wiseman is remarkably nonjudgmental; his best scenes are poignant rather than pointed. A class of blind children lie on the floor while three teachers caress them with wispy fabrics and a piano plunks out Over the Rainbow. "I want you to think about pleasant things," says a teacher soothingly, "and I want you to let the music go all inside...
...movie Dirty Dancing. The shrewdly calculated saga of a girl's coming of age in 1963, the film Dirty Dancing is responsible more than anything else for this new slew of what might be called pube rock. The movie was so perfect a young teen dream, it became almost poignant. You had to see it to believe it, and many did. Dirty Dancing pulled in $65 million at the box office and is still going strong at the video stores...
...British film A World Apart places another child, a 13-year-old white girl (Jodhi May), in another social war zone: South Africa, 1963. Shawn Slovo's semi-autobiographical script sketches a poignant dilemma: a crusading career woman (Barbara Hershey) whose cause takes precedence over motherhood. The film, though a bit of a plod, earned a thrilling reception at the festival. It took the Special Jury Prize (second place) and an award for three of its actresses, including Hershey, the first performer to win Cannes laurels in consecutive years...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new novel, Love in the Time of the Cholera, however, shows us in a humorous yet poignant way that true love is still possible. The Colombian author considers several types of love--from innocent love, to bordello love, to frustrated love, to dying love--but each form of the emotion manages to last for a lifetime...
Director Tim Burton (Pee-Wee's Big Adventure) has some poignant points to make about, well, life: that the dead must teach the living to savor it. Mostly, though, he wants to give good fun, to turn Winter River into West Eastwick, to ransack pop culture for references to everything from Topper to Tiny Alice. And to give Michael Keaton the chance to run productively wild. Keaton's Beetlejuice is a deliciously loathsome creature, whether shouting insults, lunching on insects or, in the film's climactic wedding scene, pulling a ring off a severed, shriveled finger and muttering...