Word: shiftlessness
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...hasty and thoughtless ways. The question is, How much time do we need to absorb the splendid example they set? Given the simple schematics of their characters and story, not very much. The only bar to their happiness is the reappearance in Emma's life of her shiftless former husband Bobby Jack (Brian Kerwin), who represents bad values as plainly and as boringly as they represent good ones. But Director Martin Ritt seems to labor under the delusion that Murphy's Romance requires patient and delicate explication. Or maybe he is a city slicker seduced by the languid rhythms...
...resolved to quit my shiftless existence and only go out with a mission...
...Chinese Ghost Story and Rouge, and he would later earn international acclaim in Chen Kaige's Concubine?still his fullest, grandest performance. But it was Wong Kar-wai who illuminated the inner Leslie on the big screen. Days of Being Wild made him a '60s Ah Fei (shiftless youth) whose mistreating of women is his payback to the mother who deserted him; it won Cheung a Hong Kong Film Award for best actor. In Ashes of Time, cast as a martial-arts scoundrel, he ably anchored a film of top Chinese stars and rapturous visual splendor...
...this for Lee: he is an equal-opportunity annoyer. He condemns whites for manufacturing the old image of the shiftless, larcenous Negro and for still seeing blacks through that warped prism. He also chastises blacks for inhabiting restrictive new and polar-opposite categories: the gangsta and the Buppie. Satire typically proceeds from two impulses: rage at the powerful and contempt for the masses. Lee has both...
...clear how deeply she has preplanned them and how much they are inspired responses to the shifting circumstances of her shiftless victims. But in a day when intricate plotting has become a lost art, one of Cousin Bette's great pleasures is its capacity to plausibly surprise. It's not its only pleasure. Lange's work is wonderfully controlled, her hidden passions expressed with glancing delicacy. And stage director Des McAnuff, making a smashing film debut, subtly poises the endless, deadly ironies of this tale against the efficiently suggested feverishness of Paris just prior to the revolution of 1848. Rarely...