Word: tanners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Edward E. Tanner III, 55, who, under the pseudonym Patrick Dennis, wrote the 1955 bestseller Auntie Mame; of cancer; in Manhattan. Tanner was promotion manager for Foreign Affairs magazine when the eleventh publisher he tried agreed to print Mame, the zany tale of a rich young orphan and his eccentric aunt. It later became a play, a film and a Broadway musical. Tanner wrote twelve novels as Patrick Dennis and four as Virginia Rowans. "Writing isn't hard," he once said. "No harder than ditch digging...
...easy to imagine the eight major characters of Alain Tanner's Jonas Who Will Be Twenty-Five in the Year 2000 bundling into the back of the moving van owned by the protagonist of Wim Wenders' dour Kings of the Road. Wenders' people are preoccupied with their own rootlessness. In Tanner's mirthless Swiss political comedy everyone is one variety or another of Boho Marxist. In Kings of the Road, the hero, Bruno, and his sidekick, Robert, are only sporadically looking to connect. For the most part, they have engineered a working arrangement with hopelessness. They...
...Tanner's Jonas, on the other hand, is shot in sprightly colors, but seems to have had the vitality talked out of it. Here are eight characters in search of a dialectic, survivors of the new politics, the new morality, living on the ragged fringes of the old order, wondering why things have not come right. One runs an experimental school, another (zestily and engagingly played by Miou-Miou) is a supermarket cashier who deliberately undercharges her customers. This is a good, fertile field for comedy, but Tanner plows it under with self-seriousness and congenital melancholy...
...total comic command is Tessie O'Shea acting like a Margaret Ruther ford come marvelously back to life. Di rector Tony Tanner keeps the rest of the divertingly able cast as nimble as human fleas. It is quite easy to imagine that children will have a particularly happy time at this show, and ditto most of their elders...
...time Adriana tells Paul suddenly one day that she is going to leave him, because she's frustrated by his inability to see through to the "real" her, we are neither prepared nor surprised--nor interested, for that matter. Perhaps Tanner and his experiment with modernist formalism has succeeded too well. In approximating life in all its bleak, discontinuous reality, he has made a film that, like most of life itself, is boring. From the perch of his director's seat he surveys the ennui-stricken masses who pour into the movie theaters, hungering for an insight into the chaos...