Word: sordidness
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When I slept through successive visits to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I never once blamed the music or conductor to be “sordid,” “tedious,” “egotistic,” “uninspired,” or any of the myriad missives that the author uses against the festival. Instead, I admitted that I could not just appreciate the music. Such an admission is beneath the author, who proceeds with his snide remarks: incompetent journalists, “tough locals,” thieving Rastafarians...
PANAFEST—not an acronym, but unfailingly capitalized by Ghanaian journalists—is a sordid affair that mixes tedious, egotistic African government types with local Rastafarians conniving to profit off of stupid tourists with the mushy, self-righteous black American tourists themselves, coming “back to Africa” to rediscover their roots...
Film enchantment, of a baroque species that mixes the sordid with the soaring, is Gilliam's specialty--that, and making movies with big ideas and impossibly spectacular imagery. At times his films become missions impossible. The Spanish shoot of his epic The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort, was so plagued by calamities that the only productive thing to come out of it was the disaster-movie documentary Lost in La Mancha. So many other projects have stalled that, at 64, Gilliam has joined the ranks of such hard-luck masters as Orson Welles...
...hardly a perfect musical. The songs are functional, not indelible. The dialogue wallows in the least engaging of performer emotions, narcissism and self-pity. The plot asks you to believe that performers in a musical are selected on a kind of psychiatrist's casting couch, spilling their secret sordid pasts to the director. Yet the thing worked onstage as a puissant metaphor for shab-elegant show biz, where exhibitionism and humiliation dance in precise sync, where each passion must be displayed nakedly and clothed in artifice, where a dedicated pro's highest hope is to tap and smile invisibly behind...
...unlike Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Because Van Sant, from the U.S., and Egoyan, the Canadian, are revered for their elaborate, eccentric visions, we figured we would not get simple tabloid tattle. We came expecting an upscale approach that would anatomize the tawdry headlines and view the sordid spectacle from a remote, ironic height. Art-film gossip is dish best served cold...