Word: primal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...young, attractive actor-singers give heartfelt performances nonetheless, never condescending to the characters but finding dignity in their primal passions. In particular, Willard White and Cynthia Haymon invest the title roles with wrenching believability. In Nunn's conception, the crippled beggar Porgy is less pathetic and helpless than in most productions, hobbling on crutches instead of pushing himself on a cart. At the end he flings away his crutches and, in search of his missing Bess, lurches off painfully, heroically into a blaze of backlighting. It's a dazzling final image, but one that also points up the drawback...
...BOTTOM LINE: Macauley Culkin plays against type in a no-frills thriller that grippingly evokes primal fears...
...shortest possible distance, at some not exactly subtle but inescapably gripping point. It ain't art. Nobody's ever going to call him the new Hitchcock. But there's something admirable in his disdain for high, fancy stepping, his heedlessly efficient drive to put us in touch with the primal ooze of our worst imaginings...
...been boys ages 8 to 14. It is with this group that the power of interactivity can be seen in its purest form. Unlike young girls, who seem to be able to take video games or leave them, boys tend to be drawn into the games at a deep, primal level. Many simply can't tear themselves away, to the detriment of their schoolwork, their eating habits and their health...
...white, dread is absolved by belief -- in God, in dreams, in the rolling sing-along cadence of a doo-wop bass line. "We all end in the ocean,/ We all start in the streams,/ We're all carried along/ By the river of dreams." And by effortlessly sophisticated, perfectly primal music. It makes the journey of faith as jaunty as a Nintendo quest...