Word: primal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...last week had three: Tracey Ullman impersonating '50s stage mother Florence Aadland in a tour de force that has just closed; Jackie Mason opining about almost everything; and Julie Harris portraying writer Isak Dinesen. Off-Broadway, Eileen Atkins appears as Virginia Woolf. Artistically, these shows recall the theater's primal origins in storytelling. At best they offer unexcelled emotional intimacy between actor and audience. At worst they lack dramatic movement and reveal character in the most obvious way: by declaiming, instead of through the subtler means of behavior...
...More primal desires can be satisfied at the Mustang Ranch, a legal bordello near Reno, which is offering gulf heroes a free day with a floozy. Some 800 servicemen have already signed on. Soldiers will be soldiers...
...story is primal, and so are Zhang's cinema strategies. Everything is told through gestures and colors. In the undressing scene, the beautiful Gong Li (who is the director's offscreen companion) wordlessly expresses the range of Ju Dou's feelings, from shame to rebellion to cool majesty. And with its sensuous color scheme -- reds, yellows, blues, in bold and subtle tonalities -- Ju Dou looks like a dream of carnage at sunrise. When the couple make love by the dye vat, a long bolt of red fabric unravels past Ju Dou's face: an ornament to her ecstasy...
Gerard Depardieu, France's best and best-known actor, is a glutton for adventure. He eats with two hands, acts with both fists. Onscreen he radiates wild energy, acting from his capacious gut, whispering or raging as the role allows and the moment demands. He embodies the primal male caged in modern society, ever raising the ante on his own anarchic instincts. To call him a bear of a man is to give bears too much credit; they have not his strut, his growl, his formidable charisma. It is said that when French bears see a particularly imposing member...
...always the physical part of homelessness that is hard: home and homelessness are also ideas, emotions, metaphysical states. Home is all the civilization that a child knows. Home is one of nature's primal forms, and if it does not take shape properly around the child, then his mind will be at least a little homeless all its life...