Word: pretexts
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Beckett is eventually fired from the firm on the pretext of incompetence, and engages Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), a charismatic ambulance-chaser, to claim wrongful dismissal on his behalf. Miller is staunchly homophobic, and it is only when he sees first-hand the discrimination which Andrew faces in a law library that Miller can sympathize and agree to represent him. In the process, Miller carefully reconciles his own loathing of homosexuals with his clear feeling that the law was broken when Andrew was fired. Miller grows realistically, not Hollywood-miraculously, never completely reversing his views but admiring Andrew and having...
...help but wonder whether or not the asylum pretext is a license to disregard the demands of serious acting. The publicity for this show set up something of a false expectation: It's not profound, decadent perversion we get from Marat Sade, but rather sustained novelty and a few snapshots of dementia, something to smile at and walk away from...
This, you ask, is the stuff of comedy? No, not exactly. It is the pretext for comedy -- wonderful comedy, maybe the best of the year. For The Snapper (the word is local dialect for a baby) isn't really about making mistakes. It's about how, as Sharon comes to term, the Curley family all come to terms with what she's done, with themselves and with the little gossiping corner of the world they inhabit...
...granddaddy of all German Romantic operas, with its setting of a folktale about a forester who accepts magic bullets from the Devil to win the hand of his beloved in a shooting contest. For Waits, Burroughs and Wilson, what the opera provided wasn't an Ur-text but a pretext...
Under the pretext of examining generational change, "Household Saints" offers us little insight or amusement. Instead of evolving through struggle to balance the experiences of old world and new, the characters in this movie oscillate back and forth from rigid traditionalism to moderation and back again...