Word: slather
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...sense of expansion and refreshment one feels in going from a reproduction of a well-known painting to its original is lacking, because his paintings are all based on silk-screen reproduction of photographic images. Whether flat and grainy, as in the '60s, or worked up with a creamy slather of broad-brush pigment, as in the '70s and '80s, they are essentially simulations of the act of painting, types of visual packaging...
...point of his career was in the 1940s. He decided, in a mood of perversity, to paint "modern art" -pictures full of impressionist fuzz and expressionist slather. The Gorgon, 1943, a wretched parody of Monet applied to a surrealist syntax, may be the least inept of these. If anything, they showed how far Magritte's real gifts lay from the orthodox processes of modernism. Nor did his first essays in the surrealist manner, done in 1925-26, indicate much about the artist to come; they are, for the most part, grab bags of motifs from other painters, chiefly Ernst...
There is very little acting and no detectable direction in the production. Some care has been taken to slather the actors with pastes suitable to their sordid states, but why was no hair mussed? I like the way the girls wear their hair, and hope that they continue wearing it off-stage so, but nuts just aren't that tidy. Something should also be done about Sherry Turkle's legs, which are quite pleasantly pink. Miss Turkle plays the maid Maria, in this production a septuagenarian cackler. Of course I don't begrudge her her pink legs, but it just...
Profuse with C scrolls and S curves, rococo has often been labeled an interior decorator's art. In courtly architecture, such as Munich's dainty Amalienburg palace, plaster tendrils so slather the rooms that the ceiling is inseparable from the walls. Rococo was ornament become form, rather than the link between forms. It added asymmetry to the earlier style of baroque art, as one would add fantasy to fiction. Where the baroque was epic, rococo was lyric. It had a horror of straight lines, as if such were the symbols of reason and order...
There are compensations. The picture has been flashily produced in a slather of Eastman Color that often looks like violet shaving cream. It has been smartly directed by Michael (Cyrano de Bergerac) Gordon. And it presents, in the part of Rock's jealous rival, one of the funniest young men in movies today: a sort of Ivy League Dracula named Tony Randall...