Word: taut
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lawrence Sanders' novel could serve as the basis for a taut, lurid little film noir, but this adaptation is as plodding and routine as most police work-or as a police novel unredeemed by narrative surprises or a galvanic prose style. The plot doubles back on itself and wanders off on pointless tangents. A subplot involving Delaney's critically ill wife (Faye Dunaway) is never integrated into the manhunt story, and Dunaway is wasted in a role that keeps her flat on her back. Mostly, she is forgotten as the gumshoe and the hobnail boots approach each other...
Until 1960, film was primarily a representational art. Then Godard and his fellow iconoclasts suspended disbelief like a taut high wire across which his characters danced and ambled, and sometimes fell off. There are "people" in Every Man, including a TV producer named Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), his co-worker and ex-mistress Denise (Nathalie Baye), and her friend Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who works as a prostitute and has a short session with Paul. But they are not "real people." They are figures in the desolate landscape of Godard's mind. They have materialized to illustrate his deepest, bleakest...
Lorne Henning passes to John Tonelli who passes to Bob Nystrom. They are all Islanders. Nystrom--by reflex--tips the rubber into the Philadelphia net. The net goes taut. It has happened...
...Caligula but, mainly through the control of his extraordinary face, he added something exhiliratingly scary to his performance. Alex's eyes were those of a mischievous schoolboy gone insane; he had the face of a demonic baby, a sinister cherub. In Caligula, McDowell's face has become drawn and taut, effectively expressing fiendishness, but little else...
...words and phrases of power fly like intercontinental missiles, finding targets both intended and accidental within minutes of launching. The analogy, mercifully, is inexact: declarations sometimes can be corrected in flight or even called back. Yet each year, in our taut environment of colliding political interests and swelling military arsenals, careless words grow more dangerous and create an alarming impact on strained alliances or suspicious adversaries...