Word: shamelessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Surprisingly for a film biography of a man who is still alive (the real Knievel performed in Madison Square Garden a month ago), the hero is portrayed as an egomaniac, a compulsive worrier and a shameless searcher after publicity. Marvin Chomsky's direction is pedestrian, but the script (by Alan Caillou, John Milius and Pat Williams) has some nice moments of quirky comedy, as when a fissure opens in the earth and a rather large automobile disappears without a trace. The film is good-naturedly skeptical and occasionally satiric about Knievel's exploits-in marked and welcome relief...
...come to find criticism a duty, an outlet for energy." When Hamilton's first letter of proposal to Hermia arrives, Eliza wants to answer it herself. When a second comes, she opens it and attempts to hide it. Like her predecessors in earlier books, Eliza is not only shameless, but awash with grandly rhetorical self-pity: "Years of care, of asking little for myself and accepting less, in order to save the family home...
...highly theoretical argument for censorship is made by University of Toronto Government Professor Walter Berns. Democracy, more than any other form of government, requires self-restraint by its citizens, he maintains, and self-restraint can be partially achieved by laws governing public amusements. Pornography makes people shameless, he believes: "Those who are without shame will be unruly and unrulable; having lost the ability to restrain themselves by obeying the rules they collectively give themselves, they will have to be ruled by others." Therefore pornography leads to tyranny, Berns concludes...
...year-old Nately (Art Garfunkel) confronts a 107-year-old pimp. The scene is photographed narrative, almost word-for-word from the book's symbolic and simplistic confrontation: weary but supposedly immortal Italy v. vigorous but naive and supposedly doomed America. When the boy accuses the ancient of shameless opportunism, the centenarian defends himself with the ultimate weapon: age. "I'll be 20 in January," answers Nately. There is no answer to the old man's Parthian shot: "If you live...
Especially fascinating are ten reconstructions of the parlors, dining rooms, gardens and even furniture stores of the era's big-city upper crust. These handsome period settings ignore folk art and country furniture, and they exude a shameless relish for the lives of the very rich. But they also make a major contribution toward a re-evaluation of the high-style decorative arts of the 19th century, one of the last great neglected areas of art scholarship and appreciation...