Word: splendid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wound vulnerability that brings her fey lunacy back to earth. She takes a character who is mostly an idea, a conceit -- a person for whom pretending is more real than reality -- and invests her with poignancy and pride. In spirit Lettice is a one-woman show. But Smith gets splendid support from Margaret Tyzack in the thankless, stereotypical role of her clumping comrade Lotte Schoen and obliquely from Britain's Prince Charles, whose marginally less dotty tirades against contemporary architecture render Lettice's eccentricities almost trendy...
...were sopranos Grace Bumbry (Cassandra) and Shirley Verrett (Dido) and drew from it a sensitive reading of Berlioz's sprawling score. Bumbry was in good voice; Verrett was not; and the other singers tended to be ciphers. But Chung welded them and a surprisingly good chorus together into a splendid ensemble...
Mazda MX-5 Miata. The Japanese were already building more reliable, cheaper cars than American automakers; suddenly, they are also producing a more splendid-looking car. Designed in Mazda's California R.-and-D. center by Mark Jordan, son of General Motor's design chief, the 1989 Miata is the first production car to share the decade's penchant for alluding to other eras: not just a convertible, but the sweet, plump, rounded lines of '50s-style sports cars...
...Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). The middle film in Woody Allen's splendid trilogy about American celebrity dreaming. It shares Zelig's technical and narrative virtuosity and Radio Days' insinuating nostalgia, but suffuses them with a unique spirit -- a sort of cautionary romanticism...
...Their Youth by Eileen Simpson (1982). This would be a rarity in any era, a literary memoir free of rancor and score settling. The author recalls her first husband, John Berryman, and his friends, among them Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz, men who left behind some splendid poems and some sad histories of alcoholism, despair and suicide. But here they are young and joyful amid the possibilities of words, ignorant of the sadnesses that await them...