Word: splendid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...This is a splendid place," said Hemingway. "Nobody believes me when I say I'm a writer. They think I represent big Northern bootleggers or dope peddlers." Even now Key West, underneath the gentrification and new time-share resorts, is still psychically an island of pirates and smugglers, where it is rude to ask a last name or an occupation. For writers, anonymity is pleasant only until it begins to feel like obscurity. Then it is reassuring to be near other writers. Key West offers serendipitous encounters, noon walks, short talks. There are always parties, to refuse virtuously...
...shooting at them. In Sarajevo, members of a student volunteer brigade goofed and joked as they worked without undue haste at shoveling snow from the center of Kosevo Stadium. Mirjan Jarovije-vic, 15, a student at the Yaroslav Cernyi technical school, took the arrival of a visitor as a splendid opportunity to lean on his shovel and sneak a smoke. He said he had been chosen for the work detail because he was so smart that he would not fall behind in school. His volunteer supervisor, Muharen Corba, 27, was smart too. Good-naturedly he yelled at Mirjan...
...great luck or clout, you may get a couple of the few non-press and non-big-shot seats at a hockey game or a figure-skating competition, but there is just no way to watch more than a fragment of a ski race in person. Ski jumping is splendid for eyeball-viewing?all those figures flying through the air?but the races are hopeless. Flat or steep, it does not matter; you pick a good turn and watch the bodies come over the hill or out of the trees, zip, zip. Did you see Bill Koch or Phil Mahre...
Marchand is splendid too: he can trip over his feelings or break the viewer's heart with equal dexterity. At film's end Kurys reveals that Marchand and Huppert are playing the director's own parents, 30 troubled years ago. Autobiography is often the excuse for retrospective vindictiveness, but Kurys is too mixed in her sympathies, too talented at her craft, to harbor such notions. She knows that filming well is the best revenge. -By Richard Corliss
...driving his vehicle along at a great pace, so that no one notices the occasional knocks in the engine or the potholes in the plot. With help from his cinematographer, Nestor Almendros, who perfectly captures the sleazy artiness of those long-ago B pictures, Truffaut runs the course with splendid panache. Confidentially Yours is a smart entertainment, especially for those with a long and indulgent movie memory. -By Richard Schickel