Word: splendid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this splendid craftsmanship, popular moviemaking at its best, is in the service of building rooting interest in the story of a woman who keeps finding ways to transcend the limits that unexamined custom often imposes on her sex. In action pictures, women are supposed to swoon or retreat to a safe corner (or, at best, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition) while the male lead protects them and defends Western civilization as we know it. In Aliens, it is the guys who are all out of action at the climax and Ripley who is in a death duel with...
Reagan inhabits his moment in America with a triumphant (some might say careless or even callous) ease that is astonishing and even mysterious. It is an afternoon in early summer. The sky is a splendid blue, with great cotton clouds floating across it and the grass a vivid field of green. There are noises of celebration in the crowd. Tonight there will be fireworks...
Americans in their celebratory moods sometimes behave as if they had invented freedom. They have at least given freedom a splendid home. The text of the great Fourth of July birthday party will not dwell on the ugly side of American freedom (the founders reserving freedom pretty much for white male property owners and countenancing the enslavement of blacks, for example). Nor will the star-burst rhetoric discuss the heartlessness of much American freedom, the bleak lives of those who cannot compete. Freedom has a lot of Charles Darwin's logic prowling around in it, hungry for the weaker animals...
...serious work in the classical vein. Sondheim's West Side Story collaborator Leonard ( Bernstein has called him "compulsive and excessive," not least in his commitment to the idea that everything in a musical must strictly serve the task at hand. Even so, Sondheim's songbook made up a splendid 1977 review, Side by Side by Sondheim, which in turn became a beguiling two-record album. Cast albums, even of such failures as 1981's Merrily We Roll Along, are prized by collectors. Last September the belated complete recording of his 1971 spectacular Follies turned into a pair of sold...
...Rivera's political life had as many twists and turns as the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. It inflated his personal myth but obscured his achievement as a formal artist--by which, as the political characters in his murals fade into historical remoteness, he must be judged. For its public, this splendid show has set that process in motion, giving us back a great soul who was also, at least some of the time, a great painter as well...