Word: unself
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Atlantic City they do, which is why the Boardwalk reflects both a grandiloquence imported from Las Vegas and an insistence on bourgeois comfort. Parading past the statue of Caesar Augustus (finger aloft, as if hailing a cab), the Boardwalk crowd offers an unself-conscious mixture: round middles barely disguised by oversize T shirts or bulging above cinched-in belts; conical straw hats; white socks in white sandals; baseball caps on balding heads; male decolletage; painted eyebrows; sequins in the daytime; polyester stretch pants; factory-knit acrylic cardigans; lots of polka dots; colors usually found only at the extremities...
...looking at the strip and its larger-than-life iconography without conventional middlebrow contempt. The movement's manifesto is Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi's examination of crowd-pleasing architectural symbolism and buildings designed primarily for drivers. The irony is so American, so pop: cultural highbrows celebrating unself-conscious lowbrow vulgarity...
...THOUGH Willie's slurp were squashed into a shuffle and a whine. But Eddie's not an unlikeable guy; he's like an animated buffer zone. Eva, played with unself-conscious allure by Eszter Balint (formerly of the Hungarian Squat Theatre), is the film's discoverer of America. Her rare moments of enthusiasm are moments of anticipation: when she finally gets "there" (New York, Florida, Ohio) she basically discovers the meaning of disappointment. As four guide for the day, she points to a scene with an iron fence and a snowstorm and says, "Well, this is it. Eake Erie...
ONLY TWO actors seem confident enough in their roles to move unself-consciously. Thomas Derrah as Lucio, Claudio's friend, offers the only consistently sympathetic character. Lucio is the literal devil's advocate, the very personification of human frailty. Derrah makes Lucio every bit as enjoyable as he should be, without sacrificing believability. Richard Spore also does an extremely fine job as an absolute caricature, the simpleton constable Elbow...
...Getting a taste of being an international city may raise our expectations culturally and aesthetically." Roberts' hopeful and boosterism sounds almost quaint: it has been at least a dozen years since World's Fairs -grand, unself-conscious celebrations of progress and technology - were right in step with the Zeitgeist. But Knoxville, a latecomer to urbanity, is excited anyway. Even John Austin, ambivalent about the enterprise, appreciates the hoopla. Says he: "We'd still be a backwater town on the banks of the Tennessee River without the fair." -By Kurt Andersen...