Word: sexless
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Take the latest of his films, Intimate Strangers. When we first meet Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire), she is all earth tones and hesitations. William (Fabrice Luchini), her interlocutor, is all buttoned up--suit, tie, suspiciously neat desk. Anna tells a story of a marriage that has become sexless and hostile. We learn that William has inherited his business (and his home office) from his father; he has never lived outside these confines. We know from dozens of other movies that each of these characters is destined to bloom. What we can't guess is how the narrative is going to encourage...
Cole's artwork matches the unpretentious ambitions of the story. She draws her characters with an absolute minimum of detail. They are all essentially sexless blobs with singular attributes - glasses or animal ears - to distinguish between them. The polished grade-school style emphasizes the immaturity of the characters in a clever way. Everything is rendered as outlines, with no shading, like everyone is getting blasted with white light. Cole's relaxed, confident pace develops "Never Ending Summer" into a neat little view on the vulnerabilities of human interrelations...
...humorless tribute to the Ramones is like a sexless tribute to James Brown, yet half the thrill of the new all-star Ramones tribute, We're a Happy Family, comes from hearing irony-impaired acts swing and miss at their heroes' greatest hits. James Hetfield bellows "I was a Green Beret in Vietnam" on Metallica's version of 53rd & 3rd as if he were auditioning for Oliver Stone, while Marilyn Manson, who once seemed a suitable heir to the Ramones (or at least Alice Cooper) turns The KKK Took My Baby Away into a bland bit of Goth melodrama...
...have to worry about being locked in for a four-hour tragedy. Timon in this production is being played by a woman, Julie Rattey, not to make any specific feminist point but because she's good. And since the character is written pretty much sexless and supposedly died several thousand years ago, who cares? Stage designer Josh Goldston '01 is creating an atmosphere of ruin and decay within the context of an archaeological excavation. It seems fitting, seeing as Hudson probably had to initiate an excavation of his own just in order to find this play...
...showing a room full of people with everybody's face, for some reason the experience of the story got kind of confused. You were identifying with all these different viewpoints in the room. It seems like some of the best known cartoon characters end up being these peculiar, almost sexless, baby-like men - bald, pink men, like Charlie Brown, and Tintin and Skeezix, and Barnaby. It's the least specific character. It's the character you can immediately identify with, and I don't really understand it. There's something really peculiar going on there. So by [keeping out] these...