Word: solemnization
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...biting Texas panhandle wind flung dirt into their weather-creased faces, some 50 solemn cotton farmers met near the town of Tulia (pop. 5,033) last week for a ritual as sorrowful as a wake. They were there to cast reluctant bids on the well-worn tools and machinery with which Dan Altman, 65, and his son Danny, 34, had scratched out an increasingly difficult living in a way they loved: farming 1,440 acres of irrigated land. The buyers were ambivalent. They were seeking bargains, but they hated to see the Altmansget hurt. And each feared that...
Paul Schrader is the kind of director who leaves no bra unhooked, no limb untorn from its socket in his pursuit of what he believes to be the true and terrible image. Cat People is clearly the work of a solemn literalist (and a man with a taste for perverse ritual), not that of a cynic or a sensationalist. But motive makes small difference in the end result. The film best serves the values of the dimmest lurker in the deepest shadows of the grind house: it has lots of nudity, plenty of gross-out guts and gore...
...first time since Mitterrand's election last May that the leaders of France and West Germany felt compelled to focus such attention on their common stand. Their solemn communique blamed Soviet "pressure and concourse" for events in Poland, and called for the repeal of martial law, the release of union members and talks between the government, the Roman Catholic Church and Solidarity. Said the declaration: "The repressive measures taken by the Polish leadership under pressure from, and backed by, the Soviet Union, constitute a violation of human rights and of the Helsinki Final Act, and place a heavy mortgage...
...secrets, while arguing high-mindedly that the real winner is the public. This is true only when the public is learning what it had a right to know and was not being told. The rest is headlines, titillation and gossip, whose place in journalism is less entitled to such solemn defense...
Cracking jokes about this $12 million "science fantasy adventure" must seem like pulling the leg of a museum dinosaur-an unfairly anarchic response to an enterprise so painstaking, so educational, so forthrightly solemn. Director Annaud even recruited Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) to devise appropriate gestures for the actors, and Anthony Burgess (Language Made Plain) to create primitive dialects, all heavy on the grunts and gutturals. But jokes will come, especially since Quest for Fire emerges less than a year after Caveman, a goofy romp through prehistory that managed to supply the punch lines to many of Quest...