Word: twitches
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Faces in My Time can be read as one humiliation after another, swallowed with barely a twitch. When his fifth novel, What's Become of Waring, sells exactly 999 copies, Powell records the figure in the tone of a conscientious bookkeeper. When World War II comes and his colleague Evelyn Waugh flies off to serve as a commando in Greece, Powell goes to the War Office, enlists-and gets assigned to posts in England and Wales, where there is little to do but read Kierkegaard. When George Orwell dies, Powell is left to choose the hymns. In every Powell...
...with modernism, only more so, because we are much closer to it. Its reflexes still jerk, the severed limbs twitch; the parts are still there, but they no longer connect or function as a live whole. The modernist achievement will continue to affect culture for another century at least, because it was large, so imposing and so irrefutably convincing. But its dynamic is gone, and our relationship to it is becoming archaeological. Picasso is no longer a contemporary, or a father figure; he is a remote ancestor, who can inspire admiration but not opposition. The age of the New, like...
...craftsmanship. As a movie performer. Tomlin has every other American comedian beat--the nebbishness of Woody Allen, the manic antics of Mel Brooks, and the shrill flightiness of Goldie Hawn cannot come close. Such comics lack Tomlin's mastery of the subtle comic flourish, the slight gesture or tiny twitch that not only reveals character but grabs the Big Laugh as well...
JACK NICHOLSON plays Jack Torrance with an incredible range of facial contortions and emotional gyrations. He keeps us laughing nervously along, alienated from Shelley Duvall's goofy Wendy, eager to see what new twitch he will add to his repertoire. His eyebrows flap like crazy crows and his mouth and eyes twist into an astounding collection of evil leers. Even his voice changes frequency. This brilliantly amusing psychopath is a stylized mixture of madman and dramatic artist, one glazed eye directed at himself, the other on Danny, who is played to terrified perfection by little Danny Lloyd...
Such record-setting news scratches up a brief twitch of public interest and a flurry of deserved hurrahs. Yet the tidings of singular achievement seem less and less to arouse genuine excitement. New records come along so frequently, and in so many categories, that it is impossible to work up the appropriate celebratory mood for every one of them. The exceptional is in danger of becoming commonplace...