Word: sparkingly
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Julius Erving, Doug Collins and Steve Mix combined for 65 points to spark the winners...
...Much of Spark's subtle irony is converted to heavy-handed attempts at humor. Mocking the pretentious religiosity of the nuns, Enders portrays them as hard-drinking, smoking, and cursing women. Life in the convent is by no means bacchanalian, but Jackson still insists on drinking Chateau Lafitte Rothschild to excess. And Enders assumes that it is inherently amusing to show nuns talking about "screwing" their enemies as well as the neighborhood Jesuit priests. Instead of mordant commentary, Enders employs cheap shots...
...aura of political and technological complexity about this film, it still appears that Lindsay-Hogg and Enders used a butcher's knife to chop Spark's novel to pieces. Maybe Nixon should have gotten his hands on this film and erased is most tedious segments. Even if he only managed to cut out eight-and-a-half minutes, he would have saved a few souls from some of the unimpressed boredom that is this year's filmgoer's hell...
Last year. All the President's Men; this year, all the abbess's nuns. Nasty Habits, adapted from Muriel Spark's 1974 novella The Abbess of Crewe, uses the goings-on at a Roman Catholic abbey outside Philadelphia to burlesque the Watergate affair...
What enabled Novelist Spark to get away with her spoof for 116 pages-if indeed she did get quite away with it -was her severe, ironic prose. Echoing with the nuns' devotions and bits of English poetry, it contrasted with, and almost rebuked, the broadness of the subject. With Nasty Habits, on the other hand, the title is a fair barometer of the film makers' sensibilities. Spark's silvery resonance has, in the words of St. Paul, become as sounding brass. Christopher Porterfield