Word: taut
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...LAKE STREET EXTENSION, at the Ensemble Theater of Cincinnati, the characters are feral, the action grim and the vocabulary redolent of the ! gutter. Lake Street sets a father who sexually molested his son against a Salvadoran soldier who joined in the mass murder of peasants. The 90 taut minutes strip away layers of secrets and suggest a link between the men's sins -- a dependence on the propensity of bourgeois Americans to look away from ugly facts rather than decry them. A compulsively watchable young actor, Keith Brush, portrays the incest victim grown up into a punky, self-pitying male...
Ferragamo's series of delicate "invisible" shoes (1945-47), which used pieces of clear nylon to create the top piece known as the vamp, were inspired by his observation of the taut, translucent lines of fishermen along the Arno River. The swooping heel of these shoes is also nautical, shaped like the keel of an America's Cup yacht. "The toes," he once said, "should always be free to swim...
When he's not freewheeling, Crews is just plain sloppy. Set for no apparent reason in the mid-'50s, the novel has an unsettling contemporary feel that makes every detail seem anachronistic. The prose, taut and terrifying early on when sex is a threat and violence a seduction, goes limp once Sarah and Pete embark on an apple-pie romance. Even in the fun house of Southern gothic, losing control of the fine tuning is a mistake...
What's the difference between a feature film and a TV movie? For this week's lesson, compare the taut, engrossing 1990 theatrical film adapted from Scott Turow's first novel, Presumed Innocent, with the flabby, enervated miniseries ABC has made from his second, THE BURDEN OF PROOF (Feb. 9-10, 9 p.m. EST). To be sure, this later novel -- about a prominent defense attorney who uncovers a web of shady dealings and family secrets after his wife's suicide -- is a more complex, less easily digested work. Still, it might have clicked if the convoluted plot had not sprawled...
...dioxide molecule. And at Stanford University, physicist Steven Chu has mastered techniques for levitating millions of sodium atoms inside a stainless-steel canister and releasing them all at once in luminescent fountains. Of late, Chu and his colleagues have amused themselves by stretching a double-stranded DNA molecule as taut as a tent rope. When they ! release one end, the molecule recoils like a miniature rubber band. Boing...