Word: siren
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Style) makes social slapstick out of Italian law. Hoffman appears as a shy bank clerk whose beautiful wife (Stefania Sandrelli) floods him with killing affection. She is an embarrassment at the table, where she delights in sucking fish heads, and in bed, where she screams like an air-raid siren during orgasm. Months of this kind of married life, plus a hysterical pregnancy and intrusive in-laws, are enough to drive Hoffman into the arms of another woman (Carla Gravina). Hoffman's life thus becomes a long, wearing series of legal combats with his estranged wife, who hauls...
...ridiculous, but it was strong enough to survive many storms. Social critics might, and regularly did damn the high-powered car as a strangler of cities, fouler of the air and catalyst of a blighted landscape of junkyards, filling stations and hotdog stands. Foreigners might tempt with siren songs of durability and economy, and lure no small number of Americans into dalliance with a Volkswagen or Toyota. Even the average driver in the last decade or so might grumble at his beloved during a traffic jam or on the day that the insurance premium came due; he might actually feel...
...little slide projector filled with schematic diagrams of the utility systems used throughout the University. When something goes wrong, all the attendant on duty has to do is to push a specially coded number into the computer's logic system and the diagram pops onto a television sized siren that sits next to the computer console. Without leaving his seat, he can see what's wrong...
...release: there are no orgasms to let off the steam, and the violence lashes out like a lizard's tongue--it never changes anything, and the high tension prays relentlessly on an audience. The bursts of voltage are supplied by the setting: a needle in an arm, a siren, a scream, a Fat City sequence of a man waking alone ringing with hangover and dreams burning off fast, shrill urban music--devices like these make up for hours of narrative padding or careful ambience-building. It's a modern movie language...
...sexual code--in the expertise of how to win a man and keep him, how to flatter and flirt and sell their wiles. We disguised the jagged edges of our personalities to pander to the male appetite, and we sacrificed any principle for male applause. Trying to be siren seductresses was our assent to passivity and receptivity and all that men had laid down the definition of women to be. We gave up claim to doing what we were educated to need...