Word: snakes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...didn't: the critics were outraged by the expenditure of all that time, talent, money and solemnity on a story that Zane Grey could have told in 30 pages and John Ford shown in 30 minutes. They should have realized that narrative coherence is to Cimino as a snake is to an elephant: he doesn't ignore it so much as trample over it. The Deer Hunter was a botch as a story, but it had redeeming social delirium. No such luck with Heaven's Gate. An eye for portentous vistas and a yen for pretentious allegory...
...middlebrow music. That's okay; I'm a bit of a middlebrow myself, and Elvis loves Cole Porter and Burt Bacharach. So "You'll Never Be a Man" comes out a dandy pop tune, Elvis blithely propositioning a poor woman who's "under the table with a chemical snake." (People think they're tough in this world, but they're jellybeans.) "Pretty Words" ("don't mean much anymore/I don't mean to be mean much anymore") is a muddled mishmash of images. Elvis knocked senseless by machines, people weaving and stumbling around that nightclub, discovering later that the outside world...
...Bangkok cab drivers to dispense condoms along with family-planning advice, and pays the taxi insurance for cabbies who send in 50 or more people for sterilization; so far, six drivers have qualified. At village fairs and festivals, he shows up in a well-polished minibus to deliver his snake-oil monologue on the glories of contraception, organizing balloon-blowing ontests with condoms and teaching youngsters his hard-hitting song Too Many Children Make You Poor. Says he: I wanted to remove the taboo, take birth control out of the realm of the secretive and make...
...Streets snake around a Moorish church, a medieval synagogue converted into a church during the Inquisition, and a massive cathedral that seems a composite of every wave of architecture to hit the peninsula in the past thousand years. And always El Greco remains in the background: his house, a museum of his work, a judejar (Moorish-jewish architecture) church that houses his The Burial of Count Orgaz. Before leaving Toledo, take a look at the gold-on-black inlaid jewelry and the knives: both are world-famous products of the city...
...reminded him of a snake, the way he twisted his neck and head around as he spoke, squirming his body and looping his arms through the spaces in the bench...