Word: portrait
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...also suspect that the portrait of his mother is partly fanciful. She has the melodramatic sulfur of the mad mom in one of David Sedaris' "memoir" stories, the domineering vindictiveness of a shrew-mother from 40s movies. In fact, she's played in the film by none other than Ann Savage, the virulent megabitch Vera in Edgar G. Ulmer's cheapo noir classic Detour. That was 62 years ago, and now, at 86, she is the icy Queen Maddin, standing in for all the city's overbearing women. (As narrator, he says, "Never underestimate the tenacity of a Winnipeg mother...
...youth. Savage continues to impersonate his mother; his girlfriend's dog appears as Guy's long-dead pet chihuahua; and since, just before shooting starts, the woman who rented the place to Maddin decides she doesn't want to leave, she becomes an amusingly extraneous figure of the family portrait...
Thankfully, Greer spares us a one-dimensional portrait of a strong, self-sufficient woman: she exposes Anne's vulnerabilities, too. She accepts that on some level Anne yearned for her husband and feared his infidelity. Anne knew, says Greer, that London streets "were full of whores, from the sleaziest to the most glamorous," and that prostitutes might ensnare him as he passed through their red-light districts. People returning from London carried gossip that William was free with his favors, and a homosexual. The publication of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's decidedly erotic poem and his biggest claim to fame...
...statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction - that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which...
...Real Dirt on Farmer John,” opening Sept. 7 in wide release, is a telling portrait of John Peterson, a curiously eccentric Indiana farmer who eats dirt straight from the ground and drives a tractor in a dress and a pink-feathered...