Word: touche
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hoeg's best-selling novel, Smilla Jaspersen has given her professional life over to the frozen music of mathematics, her private life over to bone-chilling isolation. The set of Smilla?s face, the carriage of her body, as Julia Ormond plays her, says, ?Don?t ask, don?t touch.? She relents -- angry at the show of weakness -- for just one person. That is a lonely little boy named Isaiah, who lives in her apartment building. One day Smilla comes home from work and finds Isaiah dead, the victim of a fall from their building?s rooftop. An accident...
...world dominated by alienation and decay, the collection of Rodney Smith photographs at the Pucker Gallery is like a breath of fresh air. His photography is simple and expressive, but with a touch of wit. Compared with the in-your-face, shocking, ephemeral art produced today, Smith's photographs seem very out of place. Classical in their composition and serene in their mood, each of them invites us to stop and reflect...
...Popular movies (Ghost, Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters) with the same treatment of otherworldly experiences have numbed us to the once-ingenious plot. It's particularly ironic that his plays should seem hackneyed, since Coward's ideas broke into the conservatism of the 1940's with his sexual innuendo and fresh comedic touch. Damn that Hollywood...
While the computer-drawn landscapes are a disappointing, amateurish touch, the changes in the Hoth creature positively hurt the scene. They ruin the once-excellent pacing and remove much of the suspense by making concrete the details about the creature's appearance and activities which were once left to our imagination. Unfortunately, nothing we see the creature do is as frightening as what we imagined it to be doing...
Striving for drollness, Schrader sometimes achieves a distancing effect instead. Neither the comedy nor the melodrama is quite as compelling as it might be. But Touch was never meant to be Get Shorty. It is rather a wintry meditation on the difficulties of sustaining authentic faith in the age of telemortality. For that work, its cynicism, wry but not weary, is very effective...