Word: sculpt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Leningrad to an obscure island named Staten in the strange and hazardous city of New S York. In the process, Smith provides a Dostoyevskian cast of | characters: William Kirwill, a renegade Catholic policeman visiting Moscow to find the murderer of his radical brother; Andreev, a dwarf who can sculpt personalities out of carrion; Zoya, the gymnast, Arkady's humorless wife who parrots jawbreaking propaganda ("So it is shown that childless or one-child families, superficially suitable to working parents in the urban centers of European Russia, are not in the greater interest of society if we starve the future...
Cronenberg is a genuine writer-director-a man of vivid ideas and images. He can sculpt extravagant premises into scary narratives; he can clothe his plots in sinuous camera movements and dynamite film tricks. What he cannot do is write or direct convincing dialogue. Sophisticated actors tend to sound silly when they deliver his messages: in Scanners, Hero Stephen Lack is too hammy, Evil Genius Patrick McGoohan too wry. But pleas for Old Vic or New Hollywood performances miss the point. If Lack, McGoohan and Heroine Jennifer O'Neill act like mannequins in a punk boutique window, fine...