Word: unctuousness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cultivated, conservative man from Metropolitan Mutual doing in a place like that? The fact is that Lambeth is delicious and Muhlbach is bored. He would not put it quite that way but Señor Rafael Lopez y Fuentes, a Honduran diplomat does. Lopez is a captivatingly unctuous minor character whom Lambeth has lightly discarded. He does more than take pleasure in trying to warn Muhlbach about the hazards of playing with wildfire; he takes him to see Double Honeymoon, a porn movie in which the girl has a rather animated part. Only her death (she either jumped or fell...
...only things we do know in Barry Lyndon are told us by the narrator. The narrator has no personality. His presence is obstrusive--sometimes only his comments make sense out of a scene, and his voice has the all-knowing tone of the unctuous omniscient author. Bur he doesn't offer omniscience--only a combination of the tritest of truisms ("A young man's heart is...") and the most basic information ("A year later they were married.") The voice is Michael Hordern's and he sounds a lot like the late Edward Everett Horton narrating Fractured Fairy Tales early Saturday...
...innocent, is treated with the sort of subdued affection that never becomes condescending. The movie is well served too by an engaging Jeff Bridges and an altogether nifty cast of freshly minted characters, among whom Alan Arkin may be observed in full and wondrous cry. Arkin appears as an unctuous, anxious director named Kessler, a creation of devastating sardonic accuracy. His directions to his cowboy extras, delivered in a tone of hollow camaraderie, are depressingly, hilariously on the mark...
...exception to the general air of unctuous duplicity is an outsider, a Hollywood choreographer brought in to stage the song-and-dance numbers. Appealingly played by real-life Choreographer Michael Kidd, he treats his charges roughly, without cant, but with genuine, humorously phrased care for their welfare. He almost cons the viewer into believing that the film actually has a heart ticking away fitfully some where near its sneer-meter...
...rest of the cast is uneven. John Cazale does well as a funereally unctuous Goebbels, while Jaime Sanchez simply rants as Goring. The most dis concerting performance is that of Sully Boyar, who plays Hindenburg as a gemütlicher grandpapa with a Jewish inflection. The ultimate failure rests with Pacino, who leaves a final impression of Hitler as a poor immigrant boy who made it very very...