Word: savants
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...home where her younger sister is about to be married. Kidman, relishing the role of a hovering, parental perfectionist, disapproves strongly of sister Jennifer Jason Leigh’s engagement to scatterbrained starving artist Jack Black. Throw in Kidman’s own extramarital affair with the local literary savant, a family of bizarre survivalist neighbors, Pais’ puberty issues, and one ubiquitously symbolic elm tree, and you have something close to the film’s narrative. The character dynamic, from the beginning of the film, is in a perpetual state of breakdown. Kidman finds Leigh and Black...
...bright glockenspiel of spacy “All I Need.” Guitarist Jonny Greenwood uses the propulsive “Bodysnatchers” to rock out like it’s 1995 and Radiohead’s an arena band again. And Yorke still gets in his savant touches. There are the classical fluorishes on the delicate, “White Album”-recalling “Faust Arp”; the drum machine crunch and electronic undertow of opener “15 Step”; the haunting piano lines of “Videotape?...
What he'd rather be doing, and what he was in fact doing a few hours before we met for an iced chai in the Valley, is meeting with folks like Francis Ford Coppola about a role. Coppola asked Efron, who is a musical savant, to try to stump him with obscure show songs. Coppola missed only one, from Avenue Q, but he belted the rest right at Efron. "Believe it or not, he's got a pretty rich baritone. It's kind of great. I must be one of the few people he sang...
...shows since 1976, first with Gene Siskel, then with Richard Roeper. He's also recorded commentaries for DVD releases of classic films, from Citizen Kane to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the sleazerrific Russ Meyer movie that Roger co-wrote in his 20s. As the go-to movie savant, he's been on hundreds of TV shows, sometimes alone, sometimes with his review-show partners; who can forget that night in the '80s when David Letterman persuaded Roger and Gene to toss basketballs at a makeshift hoop? And there've been countless speaking engagements, most of them to proselytize...
...sequences it emulates. But ultimately the difference between the two segments is the attitude each director takes towards their self-reflexivity. Rodriguez’s film is funnier, cheekier, more willing to recklessly embrace its own cheesiness. You don’t have to be a zombie savant to appreciate his joke. But Tarantino’s flick all but demands a genre aficionado to fully appreciate the references. “Grindhouse” is a testament to nostalgic perversion, a kind of tribute to rebellious baby-boomer arrested development. It nails every ridiculous convention and casual consequence...