Word: relentlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...just as brutal and disorderly, with "millions murdered for a kiss-me-quick." (Think of "The Human Touch," which at least assumed there was such a thing, or that it could heal, anyway.) "Strict Time," which follows, is the alternative--Shut Up and Dance, with the Attractions providing a relentless, broken-record riff that keeps Elvis on a treadmill. (Elvis is marvelous at trapping himself inside a melody, a regular rock and roll George Jetson.) There is better: "Watch Your Step," a melodic improvement on "Secondary Modern," about how any moment you could be thrown in jail, or worse, about...
Since when is concern for the environment a "narrow cause"? Why did Henry Grunwald not include obvious narrow causes like those represented by relentless developers and speculators and all-too-powerful corporations? Without a healthful, life-supporting planet, all other causes are worthless...
...relentless Soviet military buildup of the past two decades has been a worldwide phenomenon. But in the past year or so, in addition to digging in deeper in Afghanistan, the U.S.S.R. seems to have been concentrating on its eastern flank: it has steadily reinforced what were already formidable land, air and sea forces along the rim of the Pacific. A shift in the area's balance of power would be bad news for the West. The U.S. has some important old friends in East Asia, notably Japan, as well as a big if problematic new one, the People...
...become so predictable that Polanski almost parodies soppy filmmaking. He bombards with shots of gentle animals: deer, cows, wans, all of them looking as though they might, at any moment, transform into a Stubbs oil. Polanski even presents the film's little bit of gore with extreme tameness. His relentless diffidence weakens a potentially powerful story. We watch with a dreamy disinterest as Fate designs it tapestry of despair. BecauseTess' story doesn't possess the shock value it had when Hardy wrote it almost a century ago, the film needs more vibrant and innovative direction to involve an audience. Tess...
...might be-the argument of political art - but as they actually were. Its model, often invoked by Flaubert, was the objective procedure of scientific thought, and its aim was to produce a perfectly limpid art in which the world would be mirrored. There is everything in common between the relentless detail in which the boredom and pointlessness of Emma Bovary's life was built up, and the minutely articulated jumble of reflections behind the blank-faced nana in Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882. Both works, in a sense, point forward to the "objective...