Word: sere
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES. Three children in a Liverpool family literally sing their way through two decades of air raids, poverty and a father's sere brutality. Prepare to be thrilled, perplexed, horrified, haunted...
...seemed a mad gamble: a $12 million epic about an eccentric English adventurer on the fringe of World War I, set in the sere deserts of the Middle East. It was hell to shoot: 18 months in the singeing sun of Jordan, Morocco and Spain. It had an obscure actor in the title role and no speaking parts for women. When it opened in New York City during the 1962 newspaper strike, one of the film's few reviewers, Andrew Sarris, called it "dull, overlong and coldly impersonal . . . hatefully calculating and condescending...
Then the plane vacuums up the particles again and again sails east. American landscapes are so resonant -- the sere wrinklings of Nevada mountains that hold the topaz lake, the Badlands, the great agricultural geometries of the Midwest, the stretch of Georgia that Sherman blackened. We fly now steady east, against the time zones, into darkness. At last Boston, below, slides toward us like Christmas, strings of light on velvet. How festive American cities look from the air at night...
Martin Scorsese's first achievement in The Last Temptation of Christ is to strip the biblical epic of its encrusted sanctimony and show biz. He has re- created -- in Morocco, and on a pinchpenny budget of $6.5 million -- a Palestine of sere deserts and balding meadows. It takes hard men to work this holy land, men who labor under the twin burdens of poverty and occupying oppression. Their clothes are dirt-dry and sweat-drenched. Their faces, most of them, boast Semitic heritage; their voices hold the raspy, urgent cadences of Brooklyn, Appalachia and other frontier outposts of working-class...
...secret father of Kendal's schoolboy son. The spellbound joy and agony on his face as he listens mutely on the telephone to the voice of the boy he can never claim as his, can scarcely even see, is the finest moment of performance in London. It makes this sere season well worth the trip...