Word: poignant
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...young Berenson a century ago) peculiarly congenial to modern eyes. His work is sown with recondite allegories, complicated quirks, unexpected twists of meaning. Despite its often ravishing formal beauty, it is full of unease. Apart from Durer's famous etching Melancholia, Renaissance art can show no more poignant portrayal of the way depression freezes both action and curiosity in its sufferers than Lotto's Portrait of a Young Man, circa 1530. It depicts its subject with sallow face, deep dark eyes and Hamlet-black clothes, idly toying with the pages of an unread book; drying rose petals are scattered...
...party they could get their hands on. As Dylan launched into another unidentifiable song from his new album, and the school girl groping fest continued to pick up speed, I looked around at the crowd of aged hippies. To whom do I owe the amusement of this sordid and poignant spectacle, I wondered? On stage, a burnt-out Dylan tried to work the crowd, still trying to squeeze some life out of his legend. In front of me, eight young women performed a historical re-enactment, a little tribute to the hedonistic achievements of the preceding generation...
...half-mock portentousness: "A stunned nation prepares for life without Seinfeld." In New York City, where the show is set and where numerous cottage industries--indeed, a whole Seinfeld-based economy--have sprung up around real-life counterparts to the show's fictional characters and locations, grief was especially poignant...
...risks (Jeffrey likes to tiptoe along balustrades high above the street)--reflect, in their class-differentiated ways, the contemporary male's desperate need for adventure. But Afterglow's writer-director, Alan Rudolph, is not entirely certain whether temporarily mixing and rematching these couples is a funny idea or a poignant...
...pulls out all the stops, pouring on the pathos and the pity, spooning on the sympathy and drenching it all in melodrama. Spielberg has apparently decided to stop making films and instead to start performing "filmmaking." Despite a number of excellent performances, what could very well have been a poignant and emotional tale is so concertedly and self-consciously delivered as such that it just comes out muddied and misconceived. --Jon B. Dinerstein...