Word: surrealness
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...same circuit, to the point that the survivors of both of those twittering machines are almost indistinguishable from each other. "All Along the Watchtower" arcs above the prose as Hemingway does below, not Dylan's fearful version but Jimi Hendrix's scream. The prose itself is cool, boldly surreal for an American writer--magically realistic. That may be the only way an individual can capture and filter and finally understand the ultimate horror of Vietnam: stripping naked a burnt-out old man to search him for weapons, fishing the Lake Country for fish who don't live in shell craters...
Those outside the electronic priesthood often have trouble grasping the principles of the new microtechnology or comprehending the accomplishments of the minuscule computers. The usual human sense of scale, the proportion between size and capability, the time ratio assumed between thought and action, are swept into a new and surreal terrain. Consequently, people tend to anthropomorphize the computer; they are superstitious about it. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the companionable computer HAL turns rogue in outer space and methodically begins assassinating its masters. In a B-movie called Demon Seed, the world's most advanced computer actually impregnates a scientist...
...close to achieving success. From the film's early scenes of life in the Italian countryside at the turn of the century, 1900 draws in the audience, keeps it involved, and only lets it go in the last moments. The ending--which drifts off from the allegorical to the surreal--is completely unsatisfactory, but then, 1900 is too rich to take in all at once. A last-ditch effort to make the film into a bite-sized chunk couldn't have worked. This is, perhaps, a disaster, but one of magnificent--and unforgettable--proportions...
...pale Brooks pastiche, and The World's Greatest Lover is more of the same. This is sad, for Wilder does have a fresh sensibility of his own to offer: here and there in his films one can find a sweet romantic streak and the beginnings of a surreal visual style. But Wilder refuses to trust his own instincts. Every time his movies start to travel down an original path, he pulls back and pays dim homage to Blazing Saddles...
...Translator Ivan Sanders). The effect is often striking. Konrád's metaphors can go off like depth charges: "Marble-faced generals in their epaulets and decorations receive the homage of subservient anniversaries. Men reduced to street names meet on this square." Yet when he recounts his surreal dreams, the narrator sometimes seems to be giving an unconscious impression of Woody Allen: "A man with a sack stands in the doorway, and when I walk up the stairs he grabs my ankle and stuffs me into his sack. He sits on my mouth all the way home and later...