Word: portraits
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Despite its major alterations of the text it adapts, the form of this version of The Wings of the Dove is in fact fairly conservative. No Campionesque touches a la Portrait of a Lady here. But if it's not a groundbreaking piece of art, it does succeed as a powerful, well acted and unexpectedly poignant story of love and betrayal. The cult of Henry James can take their complaints elsewhere; the rest of us can just enjoy the film as a work inspired by--not transcribed from--a great book...
...that I've done to death." True, but Kate, who prods her lover Merton to woo dying American heiress Millie Theale (Alison Elliott), is a more complex lady of breeding. She and Merton recall two other devious Europeans, also out to fleece a rich American girl, in James' The Portrait of a Lady. Here, though, the best role and much of the rooting interest go to the schemer...
What is off-putting about My Brother is that it is only glancingly a portrait of her younger half brother Devon Drew, who died of AIDS two years ago in Antigua. Its real subject is Kincaid's scalded psyche: how she felt about Devon's life (contemptuous at its waste--he was a charming, irresponsible, sexually profligate layabout); about his death (torn but loyal--she bought AZT in the U.S., and the drug gave him a remission); and about Antigua (bitter). The underlying, overflowing theme, as always, is anger...
...collection moves with ease between fine works by major masters--Rembrandt, Pontormo, Rubens, Mantegna, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Turner--and illuminatingly good ones by less famous figures, such as Franz Xavier Winterhalter's coolly sumptuous portrait of a 19th century princess on the terrace of her villa in the Crimea, or a small, haunting study of a young girl by the Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff. It is already a deeply serious and discriminating collection and may turn into a great...
...walls of his office, pictures of plaster figures of dinosaurs found in Mongolia, a reproduction portrait of a Manchu by a Jesuit and a scroll written in Jurchen calligraphy, an extinct language from northern China. Then there are his bookshelves, where books about everything from Dharma art to Bronze Age transportation are written in languages including French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic...