Word: shocker
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...past decade as a choreographer who was going to be up with the times at all costs. His latest ballet is a full-length Tales of Hoffmann based on the Offenbach opera. Introduced last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center by the American Ballet Theater, it is a shocker of another sort: an oldfashioned, behind-the-times entertainment that will offend no one, please some of the public, and bore serious balletomanes to distraction...
Whimsical, quirky, sensuous Aunt Augusta is Henry's last chance at life. Henry simply hasn't lived. And it is his travels with her, to Istanbul in the flesh and into her past in reminiscence, that initiate him. Surviving one shocker after another, his stolid primness relaxes into tolerance. Augusta tells him that his legal mother was a virgin, he is accosted by whores in a sleazy Paris nightclub while a stripper twirls platinum nipples in the spotlights. It is as if Aunt Augusta were Henry's wicked fairy...
...might say, we shouldn't expect any more from a thriller than thrills, any more from a shocker than shock. So why should the twin, played by Margot Kidder, be more than a woman who interests only because she switches her personalities on and off to fit the needs of the plot? The answer lies in the difference between Hitchcock's best films and the vacuity we expect in the typical film from American-International. As De Palma is fond of pointing out, Hitchcock at his best is much more than a technical master of plot and camerawork...
Sisters is being promoted as a routine shocker of the kind that has made its distributor, American-International, rich and infamous. But it is something more-and more interesting-than that. It is a homage by a gifted, if erratic, young director, Brian de Palma (Hi Mom, Greetings), to one of cinema's genuine masters, Alfred Hitchcock...
...House that thinks that that's the best we can play is in for a big shocker." He said his club's main assets are the depth and the talent of his players. Asked about Eliot's chances to win the championship, he earnestly stated that. "We think...