Word: reliefs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is the peculiar end of the Viet Nam War. Nixon, with justification, thought it would come with some shouts of joy and relief, some ringing declarations of "Hail to the Chief." Not so. That strange struggle has so upset rationality that there was almost more carping during the signing of the cease-fire than before. It is unfair to Nixon...
Lila's departure is in one respect a relief to an audience torn between laughing at her buffoonery and crying at her deep anguish. But without her, the movie loses its humanness, and is quickly trivialized into an exchange of bon mots. Neither Lenny nor Kelly has a heart to be broken, and that is precisely the problem. Cybill Shepherd in particular lacks the range of acting emotion necessary to sustain the human relationships at anything more than a superficial level; a serious flaw in the latter part of the film is her inability to warm up to the very...
MANKIEWICZ FEARED audience boredom because so few characters are ever seen at one time, so he introduced lots of unusual props--mainly complicated automated toys from the Victoria Museum of Childhood. He thought they would be interesting in themselves, making another character and providing relief from the constant dialogue. He was wrong, as many critics have been quick to point out. But his idea is still effective, to my mind, not because it makes an extra person but because the living room filled with lively figures extends Wyke's character into the complex fantasy of his fiction. Like Wyke...
...could the oppressed ever bear their burdens without myth--and especially without the myth of the Revolution. Myth invades even the writing of the mythologist. The critic must have someplace to stand--for Barthes the someplace is a Marxism which casts the functioning of bourgeois myth into high relief--but that standpoint is itself necessarily a myth, which history and self-criticism will wash away...
...yield to it. "It was almost the greatest pain you ever saw," he said later about the crushing pressure on his chest (angina pectoris). By sleight of hand he had transferred a nitroglycerin tablet from pocket to mouth and slipped it under his tongue. This gave immediate relief from pain...