Word: poked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Yawning Heights: a prolonged satire that is bureaucratically realistic; a machine that recycles its own absurdity; above all, a meditation on the entropy of rhetoric, the way cliches wear down and finally deflate one another. K & M's work is obliged to resemble what they poke fun at: anyone can caricature an official Russian political picture, but only Russians can do it effectively. This involves a steady sequence of double takes: Just how serious are these guys, anyway? One can imagine some good apparatchik responding without irony to K&M's appalling View of the Kremlin...
...with her multivolume chronicle of "galactic empires." Now Joyce Carol Oates has again wandered off into the never-never land of the neo-gothic romance. In Oates' case, the purpose of the excursion is parody. A Bloodsmoor Romance, like the author's 1980 Bellefleur, is intended to poke fun at gushy Victorian women novelists and such latter-day descendants as Barbara Cartland, Victoria Holt and Rosemary Rogers...
...Angeles (1942), for instance, has a decidedly rustic ambience. The vigorous textures of rough brick and redwood board and batten predominate. The hard, angular lines of the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs (1946) deliberately contrast with nature. The spindly steel columns, fragile-looking window walls and beams that poke freely into the air are a reinterpretation of classic Japanese architecture...
...TONING-DOWN she maintains a respectful distance from even her own creative process, politely refraining from anything resembling a psychological poke around. Engaged in a sixth novel, she notes first that her publishers won't "allow" her to discuss it, then adds. "I don't want to tempt the gods...
...quick, open, smart." But the out-of-sequence shooting on a movie set disturbs her: "You have to be a clerk. You have to file, recall - 'When was this part of the scene last shot?' The theater is to drool. You rehearse. You're not playing poke-in-the-dark." This is only her third theatrical film in a 35-year acting career...