Word: starkness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reasons why I don't get excited about sports is the same reason why so many Americans get really excited about sports: each game or match ends unequivocally, always with a clear winner and loser. Almost nothing else is so simple and stark, and indeed as the consequential sectors of life become more and more untidy in this post-cold war, confused-sexual-etiquette age, obsessing over sports scores becomes for many people a tempting refuge. Fifty- nine to 36, 125 to 119, 5 to 2, 4 to 0; scores are all so obvious and pure -- too damned obvious...
...Park, the view from the Rainbow Room and the panorama of the city's signature buildings are painfully gorgeous. Not only do they open up the script by providing a remarkable picture of the world in which the Kittredges and their friends live, but they provide a stark contrast to the handful of shots taken in the less ethereal parts of the city. When Paul moves in with two aspiring actors in their flat above a roller disco Downtown, and when he phones Ouisa from the West Village, the love affair between New York and the camera cools...
...climactic scene of Oles Yanchuk's Famine-33, a scarifying film about the real-life murder and starvation of more than 6 million Ukrainians by Stalin's bureaucrats in 1932-33. Not many Americans will see this picture, which opened last week in one New York City theater; stark, iconic, black-and- white Ukrainian movies, especially when their subject is "the hidden Holocaust," have limited mall appeal. But in its meticulously brutal imagery, in its theme of humanity enslaved and justice outraged, in its Manichaean categorizing of people as holy victims or soulless villains, Famine-33 has important similarities...
Throughout the film Leigh's vision of London is stark. His tendency to hold the camera completely still lends the narrative an almost documentary quality--Leigh rests on Cyril's mum's lined and bitter face or on a view of her gloomy kitchen. Pauses like these counterbalance the near-hysteria of Leigh's social caricatures. And the breathing space they provide force one to contemplate how close to reality those caricatures are. Because you can take it from me that British society does still revolve around antiquated, almost tribal social rituals. And Mike Leigh does dissect them with...
...June Paik, whose influential multimedia artworks incorporate TVs and computers, says he was talking about the information superhighway in his own work long before it became a catchword. And architect Maya Ying Lin, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, designed the black wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a stark monument that compels visitors not to revel in the glory of war, but to reflect on its sorrows...