Word: taling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...call it a day for stage and movie adaptations of Pierre-Ambroise-Francois Choderlos de Laclos's intricate, instructive novel of sexual gamesmanship among the 18th century French aristocracy. For Milos Forman and Jean-Claude Carriere, while fiddling with the plot of this deliciously nasty tale, have studiously embalmed its spirit. Valmont arrives stiffened by the elegant, inert formalism of Forman's direction, and chilled by Carriere's all too sober respect for his source and by their mutual determination to apply modern psychological understanding to the behavior of the principal figures...
...modern Pop psychology? It prevents the actors from tearing into their roles with the black comic gusto that Glenn Close and John Malkovich brought to their feverish performances in Dangerous Liaisons last year. But besides spoiling the fun, this approach / blurs the work's value as a cautionary tale, capable of reminding us that motiveless malignity is a potent force in every age and one that not even Freud -- let alone humanistically inclined moviemakers -- can explain away...
...Little Mermaid wrestles with no such ambiguities. It comes with flourishes, a rainbow and a perfect kiss -- full heartstring accompaniment. But from the first frame, Disney's suave storytellers cue you to wonderment in their adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. Ariel is a mermaid princess with a teenager's yen to travel beyond her world and become part of the forbidden one above. To her father, King Triton of the Mer-people, humans are "spineless, savage, harpooning fish eaters." To Ariel they are skyrockets and sea chanteys and buried treasure -- the thrilling unknown. Then she spies hunky...
Thanksgiving starts the glut of year-end films: an all-star Steel Magnolias, a ponderous Valmont, a shaggy-dog story and one certified stunner, Disney's fairy-tale cartoon The Little Mermaid...
...broadly responsive chord. Jumanji (1981), his board-game fantasy, won the Caldecott Medal, the industry's most prestigious award for illustrated children's books. The Polar Express, also a Caldecott winner, has appeared on best-seller lists in three Christmas seasons since its release in 1985. In this lovely tale, a boy wakes on Christmas Eve to find a train wreathed in steam below his bedroom window, waiting to take him to the North Pole and a meeting with Santa Claus. In all, the nine books Van Allsburg has published over the past decade have sold almost 2 million copies...