Word: portraits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Oddballs are Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski's specialty. Five years ago, the screenwriting partners turned the life of cross-dressing B-movie director Ed Wood into a critically acclaimed film starring Johnny Depp. Next they wrote The People vs. Larry Flynt, a Capraesque portrait of the porno kingpin who won a First Amendment case before the Supreme Court, with Woody Harrelson in the title role. But even for these masters of the "anti-biopic," which they describe as a movie biography of someone who doesn't really deserve one, telling the story of comedian Andy Kaufman presented a challenge...
...astronomers to test this theory by measuring how the sun shifted light coming from a star. The results were announced at a meeting of the Royal Society in London presided over by J.J. Thomson, who in 1897 had discovered the electron. After glancing up at the society's grand portrait of Sir Isaac Newton, Thomson told the assemblage, "Our conceptions of the fabric of the universe must be fundamentally altered." The headline in the next day's Times of London read: "Revolution in Science... Newtonian Ideas Overthrown." The New York Times, back when it knew how to write great headlines...
...flesh-and-blood Gandhi was a most unlikely saint. Just conjure up his portrait: a skinny, bent figure, nut brown and naked except for a white loincloth, cheap spectacles perched on his nose, frail hand grasping a tall bamboo staff. This was one of the century's great revolutionaries? Yet this strange figure swayed millions with his hypnotic spell. His garb was the perfect uniform for the kind of revolutionary he was, wielding weapons of prayer and nonviolence more powerful than guns...
...Papa's got a brand new shirt--or two. One with a facsimile of Ernest Hemingway's birth certificate and the other with this year's annual commemorative portrait. Perfect for cleaning your trawler...
...puddles than Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain. (Ten years the family rented the same flooded ground floor, and no one thought to lay a plank from the doorway to the stairs.) The three boys playing Frank at 7, 11 and 15 are fine. They create a collective portrait of a child tough enough to survive a horrendous youth and a man brave enough to recall...