Word: present
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...embrace our past and we embrace our present,” she added. “But we are looking towards our future...
...characters—like the infamous Cheshire Cat—such distrustful personas are lost in this film. They seem to have toned down their trickery and traded it in for a more helpful, family-friendly approach to Alice’s strife. Wordplay and clever puns are still present, but the ever-cooperative actions of Alice’s companions do not match their tangled, devious verbal logic. The uncertainty surrounding Alice’s environment is thus lost, leading to a more comfortable depiction of her journey...
...winners / Okay, well let’s see.” Not only are these rhymes depressingly conventional, but worse, they cast the beats in the background, thereby preventing the best aspect of “Plastic Beach” from shining through. This same problem is present on “White Flag,” in which banal rhymes ultimately dominate the fantastic opening of the Lebanese orchestra, who create an exotic and fast-paced rhythm through deep, resonating hand drums, a lighthearted flute, and a frenetic violin...
...repetitive and opaque lyrics—“Some kind of mixture / Some kind of gold / Some kind of majesty / Some chemical load / Some kind of metal made up from glue / Some kind of plastic I could wrap around you.” While these lyrics present nothing in the way of narrative or even clear subject matter, the concepts of industrial fakeness and natural richness seem partially reconciled, as a “chemical load” is put on the same level as “gold” and “majesty...
...meaning Fish achieves with the present-day setting is negated by the baffling stark and technological aesthetic he forces on the show, which works against the script rather than with it. Videos projected onto a gigantic screen throughout the production are particularly off-putting. Even when the video works in a technical sense, it is distracting, unnecessary, and alienating. This is no fault of video designer Joshua Thorson, whose work is actually quite charming by itself. Rather, any video—even as engaging as Thorson’s—simply makes no sense here, where...