Word: toying
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...this bourgeois Christmas Eve gathering, social dancing -- the children and their parents together -- fosters this gentle civilizing process. Later the young protagonist Marie (Jessica Lynn Cohen) has a dream touched off by her naughty kid brother Fritz, who breaks her favorite new toy, a nutcracker. The dream starts as a nightmare: the family's Christmas tree grows to alarming proportions; huge mice scuttle threateningly around her until they are conquered by a newly potent nutcracker (Culkin), who is then transformed into an angelic, pink-suited prince. Thereafter the dream becomes a cotton-candy fantasy as the prince escorts Marie...
...subtleties of language. The filmmakers, clearly delighted with the possibilities of anachronistic dress, sets, and props, can't stop sprinkling them on, even when they're pointless and distracting. Like the abrupt cuts from scene to scene, these anachronisms are jarring and seem altogether a little too precious: a toy robot is set adrift, a bunch of sneakered men are directed in sit-ups by a man in a hooded sweatshirt, and the courtiers at the meeting where Gaveston's exile is discussed are dressed as a bunch of IBM executives. In one mob scene a group of demonstrators wield...
...familiar score and choreography tell the story of young Marie, celebrating Christmas with her parents, her brother Fritz and a houseful of guests, when her mysterious godfather arrives with magical gifts and a charming nephew. Marie is enchanted by his present of a nutcracker shaped as a toy soldier, and by his nephew. That night she dreams of a battle of mutinous mice, won by the nephew in the guise of a life-size nutcracker. Marie and the Nutcracker are then carried off to the land of the Sugar Plum Fairy, where they are entertained by dancers of every country...
...week, Chris Knox, who's spent the last decadeplus in his native New Zealand as half of Tall Dwarfs, the cruelest-minded, most inventive, funniest, and possibly the most interesting duo on the 80s-90s global rockscape. (Before that, Knox fronted NZ's premier punk bands, the Enemy and Toy Love.) Meat contains most of his two solo albums, Seizure and Croaker--solo records in the literal sense, since there's no backing band and no studio musicians. Instead, it's Chris Knox singing, playing his loud'n'fuzzy guitar, then going back into the studio and playing a bass...
...Alone," Merrill had written in the early poem "Hourglass," "one can but toy with imagery": maybe the thin narrative here, of Kimon and Seldon and Claude and mother and father and Robert and others, is Merrill's effort at a kind of writing more social, and more transparent, than the elaborated imagery of even his clearest verse. The new clarity of Merrill's prose, unfortunately, often sounds like this: "Yet I couldn't help noticing, alone with Freddy at his visit's end, how much more freely my tongue wagged and my mind worked than they did with Claude...