Word: quicksands
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Christie's fine shoulders can carry every burden but this picture. Even she is crushed by its lumbering platitudes, its obvious ironies, its pacing mired in quicksand. Maria Luisa Bemberg (who directed a fiery Oscar nominee, the 1984 Camila) never secures her characters in the larger landscape. The Peronistas stay offscreen, darn the luck, while the upper-crusters sit idly by, aspiring to Coward's wit and Chekhov's melancholy. Ennui finally devours them all, long after it has consumed the viewer. By Richard Corliss...
Before we descend into a quicksand of depression and despondency, however, we do well to remember that although both Harvard's and the Statue's birthdays may have occured at times of trouble--the turmoil of the Continental Congress, the Post-Reconstruction birth pangs of a reconstituted nation, and the eve of World War II--the greatest moments in the lives of the Statue and the College were always on the heels of these birthdays or just over the horizon...
...acting is uniformly remarkable, given the dramatic quicksand in which the cast is drowning. Richard Gere avoids getting by on his gooooooood looks and instead makes the most of his dramatic moments playing a good kid shocked and fascinated at the dirty dealings of the underworld. Diane Lane just the right mix of street-survivor and sensitivity, making her an inspiring and sympathetic character...
...does. If Lange initially seems in danger of sinking in Southern quicksand, she soon gains her footing and brings one of Williams' most memorable roles to stunning life. Prancing, preening, snarling from a half-crouch that is alternately seductive and menacing, she is constantly in motion. "Maggie the Cat is alive!" she shrieks, and one has no trouble believing her. If there were still any doubts after her performance in the movie Frances, Lange here serves notice that she is an actress to be reckoned with...
...mile trip from the capital to the outpost of Kalait in northeastern Chad can take days, even weeks, over one of the worst roads in Africa. It varies from soft, treacherous quicksand and dunes to flinty, sunbaked plains to immense boulders. On occasion it is mined by rebel infiltrators, and sometimes it is patroled by bandits of uncertain political persuasion...