Word: taut
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...began as a taut suspense drama. A band of hooded, heavily armed terrorists invaded the ground-floor offices of Barcelona's Banco Central, taking some 200 hostages and demanding the release of four army and Civil Guard officers who were under arrest for their roles in last February's attempted military coup. They threatened to kill the hostages and blow up the bank if their demands were not met. After a 37-hour siege, crack squads of special police moved in to capture the terrorists and free the hostages...
Lewis Teague directed Sayles' finest B-movie script, The Lady in Red (1979)-a tart, taut evocation of the '30s working-class underworld-and here he plays camera tricks on the audience without ever cheating. The screenplay takes Madison's point of view, the camera takes the alligator's, and for most of the film they fight each other to a crafty standoff. Aided by Teague's expert direction, Sayles has created a reptilian specter for urban paranoia-alligator as allegory. The beast may not be plausible, but the fear it engenders...
...understood through his public utterances, and examines the way his subject spoke as well as what he said. In his biography of Channing, the author acknowledges an abbreviation of outward detail. He prepares us quickly for our journey into William Ellery Channing's mind; we learn in six taut paragraphs that he graduated from Harvard with a gift for oratory and sailed for Virginia in November, 1798, where he grew less sociable and more insular in Richmond as he searched for direction and purpose in his life. Five years later he had decided on a career in the ministry...
...Elvis was a ferret trapped in a septic tank...He got his rocks off that time, the fury dribbled out, and Trust is his depressing post-coital meditation--no longer an active participant. Elvis watches us all from the stage. Trust, his most objective album, is also his least taut: it breathes, and sometimes it hyperventilates. The songs are more spacious, giving Elvis more chances to pose, to mince a bit, and some of his vocals have a slurred, lolling quality, made creepy by strangely dissonant, disconnected back-up vocals. See him there, leaning against the piano, "trying to look...
...workout list for the first day puts you at 7 a.m. so you set your alarm for six-fifteen. You wake up in an empty room, lit--a rare and not unwelcome sight--with the reddish-yellow of dawn. You stretch--your muscles are taut and sleek, perhaps the best shape you've been in ever--and put on your sweats. The morning air is cold, and you manage a jog down an empty Boylston Street. The boathouse looks strange lit from the east, but crews are already tying in as you cross Anderson bridge. A bright sunny...