Word: seemly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...impeccably furnished apartment in Madrid. Manuela, an organ-transplant nurse played by Cecilia Roth (a luminary of the foreign film industry, with an uncanny ability to evoke tears) sits watching All About Eve with her son, Esteban (Eloy Azorin). Esteban is turning 17 the next day, and his eyes seem bright with literary genius and joie d'vivre. The relationship between mother and son is close, with Manuela and Esteban joking about sex and exchanging intellectual banter...
...film's artistry borders on the over-done as the melodrama envelops the audience. The wallpaper patterns are reminiscent of '60s acid tripping posters, and the rooms seem too perfectly contrived. While red is normally a color used on camera to draw attention to an actress in a scene or emphasize a particular state of emotion in a drama, the women in All About My Mother are continuously cloaked in red. Thus, dress provides no clues as to where scenes of tension replace scenes of relaxation. Visually, each scene has an obnoxious similarity to the one before. Despite the melodrama...
...this doesn't seem to stop the reading public from snapping up biographies as if they were retellings of polar expeditions. A glance at the New York Times Book Review bestseller list for nonfiction reveals that biographies take up a large share of the popular market. Regardless of what the domination of Harry Potter books on the fiction bestseller list might indicate about the typical reader of today, just as interesting is the number of biographies on the nonfiction list. Of the top 15 bestsellers last week, only two non-fiction books can be classified as having no biographical content...
...pedestrian as book-buyers' motivations may seem, the recent proliferation of biographies shows that biographers today are indeed playing with the conception of biography as a genre. In Sarte's novel, Roquentin's struggles with this problem led him to abandon his biography. Those who persevere and finish a biography have made many choices along the way that are vital in determining what sort of biography will emerge. These questions can be divided into two categories: how the author obtains and interprets the sources concerning the subject, and exactly how the subject is defined...
...Dreaming by the Book was clearly designed to make the potential reader reflect upon the pleasant possibilities of imagination. The author, Elaine Scarry, is our own Cabot professor of aesthetics; her impressive list of honors and credentials attest to the feasibility of the academic study of beauty, which might seem too slippery and subjective to bear such scrutiny. Perhaps we should instead see the seeming incomprehensibility of beauty as an invitation to further study; Scarry has a slim volume on this subject out right now, entitled On Beauty and Being Just. In Dreaming by the Book, she asks how literature...