Word: scent
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...your hardboiled fiction shelf. Both are set in the prime film-noir territory of sunny, sepulchral California: Los Angeles, home of Philip Marlowe (among other truth seekers) and moviemakers (among other chronic liars) for Mulholland Dr.; Santa Rosa (scene of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt) for the toxic scent of small-town failure in The Man Who Wasn't There. Both films serve up a lovely, lurid brew of greed, murder and twisted identities. But the Coen movie, with Billy Bob Thornton and Frances McDormand locked in a jealous adagio, is twistily faithful to the noir formula. The Lynch...
...Cannes did have one film with the true scent of romantic obsession: Yonfan's Peony Pavilion. Again we meet two women who forge a deep friendship, and a man who tests that bond. This film, though, is so saturated in the sad glamour of their love that style becomes substance. The moving camera, the gorgeous homes and gardens of Suzhou, the handsome people with complex urges?they all seem to swoon in the telling of a story about Jade (radiant Japanese star Rie Miyazawa), a Kunqu Opera singer who marries into a noble house and falls into a near-lesbian...
...This first part, which Heuet calls "Combray," begins with the narrator being swept back to boyhood by the scent of a cookie. From there it reads episodically, dreamily recounting summertime events during a now-lost Edwardian age that includes bed-ridden aunts, earthy servants, looking at magic lantern shows, and fussing over the intricacies of propriety and social rank. Most crudely, it's about how the boy learns to appreciate beauty, and the way art can capture...
...Leather Report "Man's Inhumanity to Man From sandal to saddle to bucket seat, the musky scent of leather has been the olfactory accompaniment to mankind's inexorable march of progress. Indeed, our willingness to crawl into another animal's skin is precisely one of the traits that separates us from those same beasts. Yet forced by the heat and humidity to shed our cowhides and lambskin loincloths during hotter weather, it's no wonder we are stripped of a little humanity and civilization every Memorial Day. The summertime German invasion of Poland, the Watergate break-in and Woodstock...
Sessions at the center are held in a bare attic room over which a lone golden statue of Buddha presides from a central wooden altar. Incense fills the room with its soporific scent. Followers meditate by sitting cross-legged in silence facing the wall. Posture is paramount: practitioners must keep a straight spine and their heads balanced lightly on the shoulders while also leaning slightly forward. Legs are crossed; with practice the knees will touch the floor...