Word: surrealness
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Part of the problem, and also the cleverness of the film, is that every character has a Doppelganger, further blurring the real and surreal, often beyond distinction. The barons and baronesses Johan encounters appear to him sometimes as they are and other times as he merely imagines them. Only after Alma tells the camera that she herself began seeing their neighbors through his dark lens do we realize Johan has been fantasizing about them all along...
...Nightingale's Song cannily differentiates its five main characters, whose portraits have a novelistic fascination. North, for example: an authentic battlefield hero (brave, focused, cool under fire) who is also a hot dog and, suggests Timberg, perhaps unhinged in some surreal way that involves a dangerous mix of self-dramatization and stupidity. McCain: a raunchy screw-up and party boy who graduated near the bottom of his Annapolis class but magnificently rose to the occasion later. Poindexter: a brilliant student at the Naval Academy who suffered afterward, in Timberg's rendering, from a blind-side naivete about politics. McFarlane...
...highlands of Papua New Guinea, in a village near Goroka, the warriors, all but naked, smear their bodies with a pale mud and don surreal mud masks. Taking up clubs and spears and bows, they crouch and advance, ghostly, out of the Stone Age (which they inhabited until the day before yesterday) and into a clicking horde of tourists from a cruise ship that docked on the coast this morning. The "mud men" mime ferocity for a little while; then they mingle shyly in the crowd of rich white aliens and try to make sense of the paper money...
...communal, spoken experience--something to be shared with other listeners--seems far more vibrant today than a couple of decades ago. On the other hand, the market for poetry on the page remains dismal, and many trade publishers have abandoned it altogether. (This has led to a surreal situation in which talented poets sometimes find themselves wishing for rejection; they can't even manage that when publishers refuse to consider their manuscripts...
...unaffected little darling that she is, makes friends with all the other students, charming them with her storytelling abilities. The story she tells, based on a tale from the Ramayana and brought to screen by computer technology, is the high point of the movie. Amazing special effects create a surreal landscape, studded with green thorns, where a blue-painted hero, Prince Rama, battles a multi-headed demon for his Asiatic Rapunzel. Told is segments, woven through the rest of the movie, the legend is paralleled to the separation of sara an her missing father. Prince Rama is even played...