Word: surrealness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There's no justice here, Justice has a department of its own," barks Senator Hamfat Hum's aide as he turns away grant applicants. But this surreal political allegory's message seems to be that justice only exists outside the Beltway, although it requires government funding...
Vice President Dan Quayle precipitated it. He and Murphy Brown collaborated in one of those vivid, strange electronic moral pageants, like the Thomas-Hill hearings, that are becoming a new American form. This is national theater: surreal, spontaneous, mixing off-hours pop culture with high political meanings, public behavior with private conscience, making history up with tabloids and television personalities like Oprah Winfrey. The trivial gets aggrandized, the biggest themes cheapened. America degenerates into a TV comedy -- and yet Americans end up thinking in new ways about some larger matters. The little television screen, the bright and flat and often...
...general, her language border on the surreal, presumably unconsciously. She describes the swings as "what appeared to be flexible silver stalactites" and says that "Cast members were poised...with fog machines." "Inexplicably," she writes, "actors chose to spin around the stage." Does she really think that the timing and movement of actors in a seventeen-minute play that coordinates lights, script video and sound is a choice or an accident...
Americana: Harris' last meal was two large pizzas, a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a six-pack of Pepsi, a bag of jelly beans, a pack of Camel cigarettes. Junk food was a sort of surreal motif in the case. In 1978 Harris murdered two teenage boys in order to steal their car for a bank robbery, and, having killed them, he finished the burgers they had been eating. (My theory is that Harris would be alive today if he had not eaten the burgers. That detail must have struck the jurors as the cool, novelistic touch of Satan...
...drama, with few aerial thrills, that puts Jules Verne (Michel Piccoli) into the time machine of his friend H.G. Wells (Jeremy Irons), with help from a friendly baggage handler (Gerard Depardieu). In the dungeon of Sleeping Beauty's Castle, a powder-puff piece of surreal estate inspired by Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, reposes a fabulous Audio- Animatronics dragon that snorts steam, flashes its stoplight eyes and bares claws nearly as long as Barbra Streisand's in The Prince of Tides. Kids love teasing the reptile; take them to see it. And lose them, if you care...