Word: taut
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...think of as quintessentially Bauhaus: spare, sharp-lined products like Marianne Brandt's geometric tea-and-coffee sets and Josef Albers' austere little stacking tables. Marcel Breuer devised his soon-to-be-famous tubular steel chairs with their bands of stretched black canvas, a skeletal combination of lines and taut planes that looked like an X-ray of a chair. Even then, while factory production may have been the aspiration for many pieces, old-fashioned handcraft may still have been the method behind them. The interlocking grids of Albers' glasswork Goldrosa give it a rectitude that says "modern...
...Call If You Need Me, a taut study of petty criminals shot in a month on a low budget, his long takes, real-time, off-hand dialogue and minimal exposition combine to superb effect in charting the pull of human loyalties. This is a gangster film that works without violence - or even revealing, until close to the end, that these pill-popping, pleasure-seeking if girl-shy goof-offs are gangsters at all. And Lee wisely lets singer turned actor Pete Teo and sleepy-eyed Singaporean cult actor Sunny Pang (cast as a country bumpkin who rises by default...
...that time, O'Keeffe had reintroduced color into her work. Her typical canvases were eruptions of soft form, like the cresting fiddleheads of mauve, orange and green in Series I, No. 4, from 1918. But she also worked in a taut, sharp-edged register that produced work like Red & Orange Streak, from the following year. Nothing about a picture like that suggests it's the work of a woman, but from early on, critics treated her paintings as bulletins from the Eternal Feminine. In her plump bulbs of color and shadowy openings they found the swells and inlets...
...much of the action; occasionally comment indirectly on each other's recollections; sometimes re-create actual scenes together. Cumulatively, the effect is to drain the sometimes shocking events of any melodrama, to force us to see them with the same resigned, matter-of-fact detachment these characters do. The taut, 90-minute script builds with a tragic inevitability, yet with a coda of redemption that seems neither forced nor fake...
...mayhem was overkill. HEALTH urgently needed an induction of discipline. The greatest success of “Get Color” is the way that HEALTH has harnassed its fury, exhibiting greater control and less self-indulgence. At 35 minutes, it is admirably concise, and the songs are generally taut. But with a lack of melody and an obsession with death and destruction that is never convincing, “Get Color” can be a wearying listen. The album opens with “In Heat,” an essentially meaningless piece of noise that clocks...