Word: torpidly
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ACCORDING to his widow, who prepared this volume, Italo Calvino considered many options for the title of this collection before he hit on the word "memos." For an American, the word has unpleasant associations--the torpid prose of bureaucrats and administrators, whose spell-check word processors restrict their vocabularies--but one can see how it would appeal to a European intellectual like Calvino. It has a soothing alliteration, and its etymology--an abbreviation of "memorandum," something "to be remembered"--implies history...
...does not depend on the outcome. The genius of Love in the Time of Cholera is the filling-in of the gaps of ordinary life, the munificence of detail that can be exacted from a place where, as Dr. Urbino muses, "nothing had happened for four centuries." Nonetheless, the torpid scenery provides a beguiling background, "the broken roofs and the decaying walls, the rubble of fortresses among the brambles, the trail of islands in the bay, the hovels of the poor around the swamps, the immense Caribbean...
...characters whom one really cares for. In the title role, Burt Reynolds has somehow mislaid that cheeky brightness that is the basis of his stardom. His performance is so muted it is sometimes hard to hear his lines, and he has directed the film in the same torpid spirit. This story of an ex-con whose moral code imposes on him a mission of revenge among the drug traffickers around Miami is lazy, dull and told in imagery as murky as its underlying morality...
...Aries in 1888 was a torpid provincial town, as filthy and exotic-at least to a Parisian eye as North Africa. Van Gogh's first reactions to it describe a foreign country. "The Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlésiennes going to their first Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world." In fact, his stay there began the general pattern of migration southward that would be as obligatory for early modern French artists-Signac to Saint-Tropez, Matisse to Nice...
Manhattan, 1921. A lovely, dark-haired girl, just approaching her teens, dances alone to the torpid ecstasy of a phonograph record in the back room of a Lower East Side tavern. Through a crack in the wall, a boy about the same age watches, transfixed. The dance over, Deborah (Jennifer Connelly) turns her back to the boy and slips out of her white chiffon dress, displaying herself in a vision that the young Noodles Aaronson will carry throughout his long, violent life. This is the first scene of the Ladd Co.'s Once upon a Time in America...