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...into a fractured fairy tale. For the film's first (and best) few minutes, we are in the storybook realm of such deformed superheroes as Pinocchio, Cyrano de Bergerac and Edward Scissorhands. But the movie soon cozies into the princess-in-hiding genre that spawned It Happened One Night, Roman Holiday and dozens more. Penelope has been locked away at home, where her fretting, frittery parents (Catherine O'Hara and Richard T. Grant) parade a retinue of potential husbands, all of whom are nauseated at the sight of her. Finally, in an attempt to define herself as something other than...
...Catholic Legacy Even before 1492, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella vanquished Granada, the last stronghold of Muslim rule on the Iberian peninsula, the Roman Catholic Church set a rigorous religious tone for Spain. For centuries, the Catholic faith - and the patriarchal family structure that it inspired - was the foundation of daily life from the hills of the Basque country to the Andalusian coastline. But the Spanish church was often an overbearing, sometimes repressive presence that brought the Inquisition and provided cover to Franco's fascist regime. Its influence was exemplified by the introduction of the Spanish Civil Code...
...funds to exploit its creative talent to the full. Iconic designs include the Cisitalia 202 Gran Sport, a 1947 automobile whose svelte curves were emblematic of the epoch's streamlined aesthetic; and Piaggia's Vespa 150 GS, similar to the one ridden by Audrey Hepburn in the 1953 film Roman Holiday. Speed also played its part in the golden age of Italian cinema; witness the Lancia Spider that homegrown idol Vittorio Gassman drove in Il Sorpasso, a 1962 road movie dripping with dolce vita style...
Alain Robbe-Grillet's nouveau roman, a novel without coherent plot, characters, chapters or, at times, punctuation, began a literary movement in the 1950s that influenced a generation of French writers. Author of 10 novels, he also made several films that bordered on the pornographic. Although he was named one of the 40 "immortals" of the Académie Française--custodians of the French language and cultural patrimony--Robbe-Grillet perplexed and scandalized readers with his avant-garde storytelling. His last work, Un Roman Sentimental, was derided by some critics as obscene when it came out last year, but Robbe...
...Roman Catholicism has never ceased to be a presence on the island nation despite the official atheist doctrine of the Marxist regime. Churches were never shuttered and diplomatic relations with the Vatican never interrupted, even as Cuban authorities closed Catholic schools and silenced Catholic dissidents. John Paul II's visit to Cuba in 1998, which Castro used to demonstrate his supposed openness, is credited with renewing religious sentiment across the island. Havana officials say today that the country now counts 520 Catholic parish churches, two seminaries, 1,000 priests and 1,500 Catholic missionaries. Bertone, who was invited by both...