Word: vagrant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Witzky (Kevin Bacon) hardly seems the prescient sort. Yet when he is hypnotized at a party, he tumbles into nightmares--or is it another dimension?--harboring fatal secrets. Scenarist Koepp (Jurassic Park) smoothly adapts a novel by Richard Matheson (What Dreams May Come) with vagrant similarities to The Sixth Sense. The payoff is relatively small change, but the setup is persuasive: a portrait of a blue-collar marriage in mute distress. And strap yourselves in for the spookiest, most imaginative hypnosis scene in movie memory. You are getting...very...scared...
...into a country as schematized, imaginative and compelling as the America of the Weill-Brecht opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny: flat horizons broken by buttes or movie palaces, bulbous baroque autos, all-leg girls and cowboys teetering on their high heels like stilts. Never vagrant or fussy, always economical, his line described conundrums that were at the heart of an artist's identity concerns: a little image, for instance, of a man with a pen whose drawn nib is drawing himself. To Steinberg, each drawing remade its author. It was both a mask...
...stumbles through the autumn landscape--"the prairie smelled of sage and of the dampness held in the earth"--he goes back in memory to his boyhood days of picking apples, his teenage courtship of Rachel, his service in Italy during World War II. Though the narrative is as vagrant as Snow Falling on Cedars was rooted, Guterson's gift for spinning atmospheric spells has not deserted him, and moment after moment flashes into life with the quick vividness of a photograph: the men in war going out "in mattress covers sewn into snow tunics and in creepers made of tightly...
...cliches into the heart of the performances. Here you find Paquin lending a tough intelligence to Alison's confusions; and Lane so all-American gorgeous she needn't act to be the center of every shot. She does act, though, and nicely. She locates Pearl's yearning in vagrant sighs and in sidelong glances at the big world exploding, outside her small one, into sex, drugs and eternal adolescence...
Besides, working on the rough edge of nature offers its vagrant epiphanies. "One day," Chen recalls, "it started raining. We got on the bus, and everyone was so tired, they dozed off. Except for me; I'm an insomniac. I was listening to Rachmaninoff and staring out the window. The black clouds were rolling, but at the end of the horizon a strip of blue showed up, then a rainbow. It was very intense--strong and beautiful, like a gate to heaven. I woke everybody up, and we got it in the movie. So seldom do you see beauty face...