Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...surefire fairy tale, the sort of thing that Depression audiences ached to believe, and one of Capra's many talents was that he could make it alt seem so tantalizingly true. As a film maker, Capra was an impassioned propagandist for the virtues of simple sentiment. As an autobiographer, he is somewhat more realistic...
...country talk, which adds greatly to the book's easygoing charm. Looking at Long Boy with his floozy, she observes that "he got that silly, dazed grin like a torn cat being choked to death with cream." Like that extravagant expression, the book is a long, tall, oldtime tale. But as Addie might put it, in the right hands that kind of yarn has a lot of prance left...
...somewhere between Stuart the rogue and Stuart the saint. And that is precisely the equivocal condition of Hot Springs itself. Miller's finely paced narrative of ego death and transfiguration freely mixes elements and intentions. Ironic self-awareness vies with variations on the old-fashioned confessional and conversion tale. Frank disclosures are offset by pretentious allusions to existential phenomenology that could have come straight out of Sartre's Nausea. But the most worldly aspect of Hot Springs is as a testimony of a man remade; it also functions as a superior form of public relations. Stuart Miller, former...
...since 2001 has a movie so cannily inverted consciousness and altered audience perception as The Hellstrom Chronicle. It is a wry and scarifying cautionary tale, whose point is most neatly summed up by the fictional scientist-narrator Dr. Nils Hellstrom: "The insect has the answer because he never asked the question." In scene after remarkable scene, assorted species of insect are shown as unreasoning, unfeeling creatures who will survive the kind of atomic cataclysm that man, with his superior intellect, continues to shape for himself. "The true winner," says Hellstrom, "is the last to finish the race...
...instead "the naked god with cheeks aflame drove his four fire-breathing steeds through heaven's spaces." Venice is not a city, but "the fallen Queen of the Seas." The symbolism accompanying the dense, involuted prose is no less affected. But Death in Venice works, as a tale, a moral instruction and as art. Of all authors, Mann was the least ingenuous. He deliberately chose the Romantic mode to bid adieu to the romantic mood. Through the spacious andante of Death in Venice, one can hear the contrapuntal knell of the 19th century with all its values, poses...