Word: tableaus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Director Boyle keeps the requisite frenetic pace, and everything literally hits the ground running. The few tableaus where the camera and the bodies it captures are at rest provide the film's better moments: the silhouetted, smoking heads of Renton and Begbie after a violent confrontation, or the portrait of the youths standing on a train platform...
Kienholz's best tableaus remind you what a long shadow Edward Hopper cast on American art. (It is a fair bet, though, that Hopper would have found Kienholz's raucousness and sexual satire detestable.) The Beanery, 1965, his famous reconstruction of a grungy West Hollywood bar--a little slice of hell, in fact, full of endless chatter, where all the clients' heads are clocks whose hands have stopped for eternity at 10 p.m.--has its affinities to Hopper's Nighthawks. Even the silver G.I.s in Kienholz's great antimilitarist piece, The Portable War Memorial, 1968, have a spectral Hopperish sadness...
...Such tableaus, breaking through the crust of American denial and euphemism about old age, madness, sex and death, packed a wallop 30 years ago, and still do today. It's not surprising that the Kienholzes' work was more popular in Europe, particularly Germany, than in their native America: Americans have never had much appreciation of satire, especially in the visual arts. Even today Kienholz's detractors think he was practicing some kind of anti-Americanism (along with the rest of the godless liberal queer whiners favored by the National Endowment for the Arts, natch). Actually, he was at least...
Conceived as a Beat-type riff on the problems of race and disempowerment in the inner city, the play starts to careen out of control in the earliest minutes. While an unseen saxophonist plays, tableaus of conflict are played out on the stage. A young man (Kevin Crockett) fights with his preacher father (Tyrone Bean); a preposterous, grade-schooler's version of a prostitute (Melanie Futorian) fights with her john (Dwight Hart). Meanwhile, incredibly realistic-looking homeless people (Nick Linski and Tania Guimond), complete with filthy hair and that unsettling, rocking motion of the mentally disturbed, drift through the audience...
...Death in Venice" is an excellent opportunity to experience Thomas Mann's work, because the film converts the literary description of nature, people and their psychological states into vivid tableaus. The movie is, however, very slow-moving. The characters' contemplative natures make this a heavy film, which is only alleviated by the carefree play of the children. Their presence in the film counterbalances the complicated dilemmas so deeply embedded in the realm of adult abstraction...