Word: swankly
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Kieslowski, who died two years ago at 54 after heart-bypass surgery, was perhaps Europe's most revered director. Several of his pictures--The Double Life of Veronique, Blue and Red--were swank fables of anomie in which seductive color schemes enveloped gorgeous actresses like a Chanel shroud. The films nearly turned despair into a fashion statement...
Irene Silverman, a wealthy 82-year-old widow, was very particular about who rented the eight antique-filled apartments in her swank Manhattan town house. But when 23-year-old Manny Guerin sauntered into her marble lobby in mid-June, she readily handed over the keys to a first-floor flat. Guerin, who dropped the name of a friend of a friend of Silverman's, seemed an ideal fit for her upper-class boardinghouse. Six feet tall with blue eyes and slicked-back blond hair, he was a smooth talker with a Jay Gatsby wardrobe. He tooled around town...
...with everything from a headless corpse to a guest appearance by the god Jupiter. Matthew Warchus' sleek, modern-dress version of Hamlet toys with the play as well, dropping entire characters (no Fortinbras), tossing in home movies of Hamlet and his father, and setting the early scenes at a swank big-band dance party. The conceit soon loses steam, however, leaving us with a fairly straightforward reading, sparked by the high-strung Hamlet of Alex Jennings...
...cultures created new elites. Jewish-American composers like Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern invented the popular song and dominated the field for a swank half-century. And as they had borrowed from Scott Joplin and W.C. Handy, so did they help bring black artists into the mainstream. Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker ran their astounding riffs on the backs of sturdy pop tunes by Jewish immigrants. This fruitful collaboration continued throughout rock's first decade, as Jewish kids in the Brill Building wrote teen anthems for the Shirelles and the Ronettes--pop's twilight of multiracial synergy...
Niccol, a young New Zealander, wrote the script in 1993, and wrote and directed last year's swank science fable Gattaca, which has much the same story (in the near future, one human man is surrounded by handsome humanoids). Niccol says the only source material he needed for The Truman Show was his own paranoia. "I often felt people were lying to me," he declares. But as the '90s devolved into media spectacles of Bronco chases, freeway suicides and Jerry Springer grudge matches, the conceit of TV as worldwide psychodrama seemed prescient. "I used to think the idea was ludicrously...