Word: sentimentalism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...there is no ghoulish sentiment in the rarefied pleasures afforded by Manoel de Oliveira's luminous film. The Franco-Portuguese Voyage to the Beginning of the World is a fable about old age reconciling itself to memory and destiny. Two histories intertwine: a veteran director, also named Manoel (Mastroianni), goes back to the places of his childhood; and an ancient Portuguese woman (Isabel de Castro) meets the French-born son (Jean-Yves Gautier) of her long-lost brother. The old woman is wary of her Francophone nephew--she keeps asking, "Why doesn't he speak our speech?"--until the nephew...
While Lyons is unable to convey much of any deep sentiment from any of his cookie-cutter characters, Dog Days is not without some positive aspects. Lyons possesses a breezy and enjoyable style, although it is not particularly complex or challenging. Again, maybe the one-sidedness of the characters stems more from the lack of any sort of complication in the plot or of the novel as a whole. Lyons has not made much of an effort to broaden or expand his characters--each is as constant and predictable as the weather in a coolly air-conditioned room...
...that happens to be enjoying some of its highest approval ratings ever. Democrats are relishing the prospect of labeling the Republicans in November as captives of Big Tobacco and a do-nothing bunch of laggards. Within 24 hours, their pollsters were arguing that the G.O.P. had badly misjudged public sentiment, that even if the ads had turned people against this bill, more than two-thirds of voters still want some bill. If the G.O.P. thinks the polls show the public won't punish them, says a White House political strategist, "they're getting snowed by the tobacco lobby...
...course it is Beijing's bosses who are responsible for making their nation what former U.S. diplomat Chas. W. Freeman calls a "uniquely credible miscreant," guilty of behavior that deserves to be picked on. But the natural suspicion and swings in sentiment that always affect U.S. attitudes toward China have been hyperamplified by a convergence of election-year politics, Republican interparty fissures, and a string of unfortunate events, like the allegations of illicit Chinese campaign contributions, Indian and Pakistani nuclear blasts and reports of a possible national-security breach in U.S. satellite sales to China. Some of the steam...
Sheedy's performance maintains an incredible level of focus and emotion, a feat that High Art itself does not manage to copy. For one, the last chapter of the film involves a descent into sentiment that nothing in the rest of the picture prepares us for. Moreover, Cholodenko falls into her own writerly trap just as Neil LaBute did in last year's In the Company of Man: her escalating interest in her story's allegorical conflicts of Work, Love, and Ambition bleed all the initial power from an emotionally explosive scenario...