Word: selfe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rooted in the ancient Samurai code of self-discipline, Warrior Mind Training draws on the image of the mythic Japanese fighter, an elite swordsman who honed his battle skills along with his mental precision. The premise? Razor-sharp attention plus razor-sharp marksmanship equals fearsome warrior. (Read about the samurai film version of King Lear by Akira Kurosawa...
...It’s a curious bit of authorial self-sabotage though, for as he witnessed the paralyzing effects of theory over action, Cortázar grew deeply suspicious of such a passive appreciation of words. In one of his early short stories, a character in a detective novel murders his reader as he sits quietly in a green velvet armchair flipping the pages. In “Hopscotch,” the pleasures of a linear plot are mocked in a substantial third section subtitled “Expendable Chapters,” the literary equivalent...
...Happily, these narrative games don’t slide into mere linguistic exercises. The thanks for this is due largely to the playfulness of the characters, who speak in slangy “Gliglish” and meet in the self-proclaimed “cemetery of language.” Oliveira’s lover La Maga enters like a light breeze: her intuitive connections to the things around her serve as a foil for the often laughably cerebral shoptalk of the others. “She picked up a leaf from the edge of the sidewalk and spoke...
...often accompanies eating is left by the wayside. The main characters aren’t locavores, flexitarians, pescetarians, or ovo-lacto-vegetarians. Instead, director Nora Ephron presents cooking and food as enjoyable—inducing pleasure rather than peccability. The film chronicles two women’s journeys of self-discovery: a bored housewife, Julia Child (Meryl Streep), gleefully bests male chefs at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and writes the revolutionary “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” while Julie Powell (Amy Adams), frustrated with her dead-end cubicle job and nursing...
...they fight.The fighting never finds purpose, and the fighting never becomes a purpose in and of itself. Nor does boxing become some sort of metaphor for life or pseudo-fascist cathartic experience. Gardener’s no fool. If anything, boxing becomes a symbol for the sort of self-flagellation these men undergo in their blind need for a spiritual home. Far from heroic, or even sympathetic, Gardener renders them as drifters, dangerous pilgrims wandering in amnesiac hazes or fevered dreams: “In the midst of a phantasmagoria of worn-out, mangled faces, scarred cheeks and necks, twisted...