Word: powerfulness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Chen's childhood friend Yan Geling, is about a naive urban teenager who, like more than 7 million other "educated youth" during the Cultural Revolution, is "sent down" to the countryside to be instructed by the heroic peasantry; instead she learns harsh lessons about the brutality of men in power. The authorities refused to give a permit to the project, so Chen shot without a permit...
...elfin charmer whom Chen found studying English in San Francisco, and the Tibetan actor Lopsang as a herdsman who befriends Xiu Xiu. But the movie is more than a star-is-born showcase. This story of a girl who rolls down the slope of degradation, and finally has no power but to choose her own grim fate, is a worthy cinematic sister to Mouchette, Robert Bresson's great document of adolescent despair...
Closer is such a shrewd piece of contempo-realism that its shortcomings as drama might be overlooked. Marber's tactic of eliding large chunks of time--people meet; in the next scene they've been living together for months--stresses the impersonal power of sex but robs the characters of human dimension. The cybersex scene is clever but seems entirely detachable from the rest of the play. Like a skilled hooker, Closer is satisfying mainly in the moment; as a lasting experience, it leaves something to be desired...
...MILOSEVIC AS HITLER Well, not exactly. Milosevic is the most dangerous European leader of the 1990s. He is a menace, a thug, a postcommunist villain who has cynically manipulated nationalism. He has blood on his hands. But his state does not have either the power or the ideological will to conquer Europe. While Germany under Hitler grew ever bigger, Yugoslavia under Milosevic has shrunk. The element of truth in this analogy is President Clinton's point about appeasement: the longer you put off standing up to aggressive dictators, the higher the price. If we had called Hitler's bluff when...
...SLOBO AS SADDAM Yes, alas, the closer to the present, the more plausible the analogy. Air power alone will probably not depose the Serbian dictator any more than it did the Iraqi one. The bombing has not yet achieved even its first proclaimed objective of stopping Serbian atrocities in Kosovo. So, analogies past, we reach the unique dilemma of the present. One may feel a bit like the proverbial pedestrian at the crossroads who is asked the way by a motorist and says, "I wouldn't start from here." The story of wrong turnings goes right up to Rambouillet...