Word: ruritanians
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...Chance the Gardener, the blank slate in Being There who provokes all those around him to expose themselves in some way. And then there's the other comic who was routinely described as a performance artist: Andy Kaufman. For starters, Borat owes a thing or two to Latka, the Ruritanian innocent that Kaufman played on Taxi. More important, Baron Cohen's approach calls to mind those Kaufman routines - though routine is the wrong word for anything he did - in which he deliberately set out to bore and bewilder his audiences, just to see what would happen. In one he went...
...movie world's first clear view of Audrey Hepburn was in a newsreel: the beginning of Roman Holiday showed the young actress, as the ruritanian Princess Ann, on a state tour of Europe. The world's final view of Hepburn was in 1992 TV newscasts of her visit to Africa last October - three months before her death at 63 - as she bestowed first her compassion on starving children and then her modulated anger at the causes of their condition...
...Connecticut, a mere pinprick even on a large world map. Its 1.3 million people make up less than 1% of the population of the Russian Federation from which it is trying to secede. But the war in this mountain enclave in the northern Caucasus involves stakes that are hardly Ruritanian. Obviously, there are the lives of many thousands of Chechens and Russian soldiers that could be snuffed out in the promised guerrilla struggle; at week's end, at least 16 and possibly 70 Russians -- counts differed wildly -- and hundreds of Chechens had already fallen in heavy fighting. Even more ominous...
...frieze of roly-poly figures enacting scenes from the Wars of the Roses, is so curiously ungrand. Not all of that is Blore's fault -- the squat thrones themselves, one with EIIR embroidered on it and the other with P for Philip, were done in 1953 and look Hollywood-Ruritanian, if not suburban. You can't help reflecting on the amount of lobbying from aspirant title seekers that has focused on this red room over the past century...
...setters, the Von Bulows seem positively Ruritanian -- starched anachronisms, prisoners of good taste when hardly anyone else bothers. So screenwriter Nicholas Kazan and director Barbet Schroeder have woven a cunningly old-fashioned artifice -- a drawing-room comedy with a toxic tinge ^ -- told from three points of view. Alan (Ron Silver) is the detective, groping for a truth he may never know or, knowing, accept. Claus (Jeremy Irons) is the cagey chameleon, resigned to a notoriety he also enjoys. "I'm wondering," Alan muses, "who you are," and Claus replies, "Who would you like me to be?" And Sunny (Glenn Close...