Word: toying
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...Toy. The scenario could be repeated endlessly: elk hunting in Montana, oil prospecting in Alaska, a quail shoot in Mexico, a social-cum-business bash in the Mojave Desert, a sales spiel atop Manhattan's Pan Am Building. The H-H passenger rides high above smog and speed limits, encounters no parking problems, and gets farther from the madding crowd than a hyperthyroid hermit with climbing irons...
...battle, moving model soldiers across a lighted destiny stage as the generals yell and cannonballs whistle and burst in the background. It is an awkward scene anyway, with the aristocrat straining to shift the wooden pieces, but Toope's Pierre resembles little more than a boy playing with his toy soldiers. The question "Why? Why? And for whom?" remains...
...good aesthetic reasons for keeping some of his work to himself. Fortunately, Henry's Fate does not malign the memory of John Berryman, who five years ago committed suicide at age 57. Critic John Haffenden has gathered 45 "Dream Songs" written after 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968)-the two books that certified Berryman as a major American writer. Henry, the fast-talking middle-aged hero of the dream songs, continued to suffer and thrive in Berryman's imagination-and does so again in Henry's Fate...
...help his marriage to her gave him. Richard Burton, as George, is even more frightening in his way: dowdy, soft-spoken, but with a corrosive edge of bitterness, hopelessness and perversity that shows just enought to make his slow, psychological turning of the tables on Martha believable. They toy with their guests (a social-climbing George Segal and a weak-stomached Sandy Dennis). They toy with each other. And Albee toys faciley with the language and all-too-transparent psychological complexities. The intensity ultimately becomes too gimmicky, but the film is still a jolter, and depressing...
...little grade school tykes and all their mischievous goings-on. This stuff could have become soupy, but Truffaut has retained a clever rascal's nose for stage-stealing devilry. (One example: the town detective's daughter refused to accompany her parents to a restaurant without a mangy toy elephant. But when they leave her at home, she pleads abuse to the neighbors, who fall for it and prepare her a special gourmet care package.) Truffaut does not lean heavy on the social commentary, as he did in The 400 Blows, his first film about growing pains. He's less angry...