Word: portrait
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...them. Director-writer-narrator Werner Herzog, a man whose great subjects have been extremists (see Aguirre, The Wrath of God), combines hundreds of hours of video tape Treadwell shot over the years and interviews with people who knew Treadwell to create an ironic, dubious, compelling portrait of a man succumbing to madness without losing his chipper, childlike spirit. People keep saying that Treadwell "crossed the line" that separates man from beast, which is surely true. But he also crossed the line between sanity and insanity, and as intimate portrait of that process this film is both unique and unimprovable...
...disaffected child, an accomplished, disapproving (and dying) father (Michael Caine) the tempting possibility of taking his act from local to national TV. Steve Conrad's excellent script is directed as a sort of sad frenzy by Gore Verbinski and the result is a very affecting movie, offering a convincing portrait of middle class desperation that ends in unsentimental affirmation. If it could have been made as an independent production it might have had the cachet of something like The Squid and the Whale. Instead, it was an undeserved big studio flop. Still, there's always home video...
...Joseph's Day Lecture: "To the extent that the Gospels are spare on Joseph's details and he seems to disappear from the scene somewhat unceremoniously, I think this prompted a kind of meditation on him by some of the great figures in Western Christianity and generated a fuller portrait...
...artists are affected by sick art from Europe. It is against Palestinian values." The debate is more than simply aesthetic: Ismail Shammout, a leading Palestinian artist who lives in Amman, was refused permission to open an art school in Ramallah last year because he declined to paint a portrait of Yasser Arafat. Early last year, the board of Hakawati, the Palestinian National Theater, canceled The Last Hour, a play in which a prisoner newly released from an Israeli jail holds a dialogue with his own impotent penis - a far cry from the typical heroic portrayals of prisoners in previous Palestinian...
...surprise best seller, Prep is the story of a quiet, watchful, chronically insecure (even by adolescent standards) girl who transfers from her Indiana public high school to an exclusive Massachusetts boarding school. More than a peek inside the dorm rooms of the élite, it's an astonishing portrait of what it's like to be that silent girl whom nobody notices...