Word: sumptuous
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This comedy of manners deserves plenty of goodwill. It was made in twelve days by 29-year-old Writer-Director-Editor Spike Lee. It displays the sumptuous camerawork of Ernest Dickerson. And it tries -- how hard it tries -- for something fresh. Nola Darling (Tracy Camila Johns) is a woman with a mind and libido of her own, much to the exasperation of three swains. Seems like Woody Allen territory, with two important exceptions: the characters and creative team are black, and just about everyone is straining as hard for effect as Nola is for the perfect orgasm. If the film...
Speak, blow, put on airs in Willard's sumptuous bar, or anywhere...
...Washington Contractor Samuel Gessford did when he built five Philadelphia row houses for his homesick wife to look at. Mansions, yachts, planes--they are all among the grand gifts in Only the Best by Stuart E. Jacobson (Abrams; 216 pages; $35). In this celebration of the sumptuous, it is the odd items that twinkle brightest: a money clip from Jack Benny to George Burns ("I want the dollar bill back!"); an Indian war bonnet from Gary Cooper to Pablo Picasso; Henry Fonda's painting of Stewart's favorite horse to Old Friend Jimmy; and from Stan Laurel to young Roddy...
...human face appears in Wild California: Vanishing Lands, Vanishing Wildlife by A. Starker Leopold and Raymond F. Dasmann (University of California; 144 pages; $29.95). A different breed of actors, seldom seen on Rodeo Drive, populates this sumptuous bargain of a book. San Joaquin kit foxes, yellow- bellied marmots, California bighorn sheep and mountain lions patrol the high mountains and hidden valleys; bald eagles and hawks, herons and condors find their lonesome rookeries. Some of Tupper Ansel Blake's photographs--a grove of bishop pines at Point Reyes, the promontories of Santa Cruz Island fading into the mist--evoke Japanese prints...
...Florentine sun, to the boot-licking Edwardian rodomontade of John Singer Sargent's huge portrait of the Duke of Marlborough and Consuelo Vanderbilt; from a marble mock-Greek portrait by the sculptor Francis Chantrey of two woodcocks he had shot at Holkham Hall, to the Calke State Bed, a sumptuous four-poster whose hangings of gold-embroidered blue-and-cream silk were recently found in their original box in Calke Abbey, as fresh as the day they left China nearly 250 years...