Word: queen
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...Since striding onto the scene in the early 1990s, Banksy has vaulted from obscurity to international renown, all the while escaping detection. Among his catalog of greatest hits, Banksy has released an inflatable Guanténamo Bay prisoner doll at Disneyland, depicted England's Queen Elizabeth II as a chimpanzee, tagged the West Bank border fence and sneaked his own Mona Lisa - her inscrutable expression replaced by a yellow smiley face - into the Louvre. "He's kind of captured the zeitgeist," says Gareth Williams, a contemporary-art specialist at Bonhams auction house in London. "But he's done...
...uncloseted gay man can be a star but that women can be stars by appropriating gay motifs. Bette Midler steals gays' jokes; Madonna steals their style. It's not just in the Nazified naughtiness of her night-at-the-Anvil routines, or the treatment of boys as toys (the Queen steps on their supine writhing bodies). It's in the dressing up as iconic actresses, the power plays and the nurturing of her brood. In a Pieta pose the star strikes with one dancer, she looks like a Mother Teresa to the emotionally homeless. The fascinating thing about Madonna...
...chief exponent, or perp, is Streep. She's lively and limber, executing a saddle jump to gymnastic perfection while bouncing on a bed and singing Dancing Queen. But she also spends a long part of the film in a strenuous simulacrum of pleasure. She has the laughs the way a consumptive has the coughs. You worry that when Streep dies and goes to Actor Heaven, the recording angel will say, "On this scale we have decades of transcendent performances, and on this scale, that Mamma Mia! thing. Begone...
...Love, is in full control of Sophie, the film's one sensible character. And Streep comes back to earth in a handsomely calibrated rendition of the power ballad The Winner Takes It All. By the end-credit sequence, when the stars appear in spandex outfits to reprise Dancing Queen, the audience may be singing along as if they'd overdosed on ouzo...
...Finn and Becky Thatcher by flashlight underneath the covers at my grandparents' home. Later, a friend and I built a raft and tried to sail across Diamond Lake in Illinois, only to be rescued by fearful adults. When I was 11, my grandmother took me aboard the legendary Delta Queen. Now, after more than 80 years afloat, the Delta Queen is to be put out of service because of inaction by Congress. It brings to mind a Twain saying: "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." I can't imagine...