Word: toneed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...would be a fault in other directors, in Kubrick it was a gift, and in Eyes Wide Shut this gift comes shining through. A sort of Everyman for a sexually liberated age, Eyes Wide Shut features Tom Cruise, a sex symbol himself, as its wandering pilgrim. And the overwhelming tone of the film is certainly one of wandering. Progressing from one self-contained vignette to another, the movie moves from a theme and variations motif to an outright symphony as Cruise desperately tries to come to terms with his wife's admission of near infidelity. But he can't seem...
...itself a deeply beautiful film. Its static compositions by Conrad Hall are overloaded with vibrant colors and symmetries that make you almost want to cry. On the surface, Mendes has packed a great deal into this movie, and he maneuvers like a pro through its quicksilver shifts in tone -- from blackest comedy to fiercest tenderness and all the bathos in between. It feels like there is a great deal here, and it's presented with extraordinary ease. I found my reactions changing even as I watched the film unfold. It works like lightning: it never strikes the same chord twice...
What makes American Beauty both so fascinating and troubling is its refusal to play its characters' idiosyncrasies for shock value, and especially its amoral complicity in Lester's lesser actions. The film's tone is strangely gleeful, for instance, when Lester viciously berates his chilly wife.Winning an argument easily with a self-satisfied put-down that sadistically needles her insecurities, Spacey lets a devilish grin sneak across his face as if to say: ooh! that was fun. Trouble is, Lester's target (adeptly played by Bening) is so easy and his blow so gratuitous that one can't help feeling...
Occasionally speakers used some humor to lighten up the tone of their presentations...
...straw men. Purdy singles out for special scorn management guru Tom Peters, who teaches disciples to think of themselves as commercial, brand-named products; the cyber- magazines Wired and Fast Company, which promote, in Purdy's view, greed and self-absorption; and Jerry Seinfeld, whom Purdy calls, in a tone once reserved for Satan and serial killers, "irony incarnate...