Word: venial
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...critical. Movie makers got more pretentious, and superlatives were applied unreservedly to works that would have been laughed at as art ten years ago, as the new media hype began to rob the public of their critical bearings. For Kael, this means that where a movie's mistakes were venial sins in the past, today they are more likely to be mortal. So she keeps hands on holster ready to warn the public of any foul play...
...sort of conduct eludes Bunuel's austere sense of outrage. An atheist who once remarked "I do not believe, thank God," Bunuel in his film mocks his own disgust at the corrupt and rigid structure of the Catholic Church. Though the sins of the clergy in this movie are venial and not carnal, they are still exposed. A bishop, on his way to give a dying man absolution, meets a peasant woman who whispers, "Father, I want to tell you something. I don't like Jesus Christ...Ever since I was a little child, I have hated him." Aghast...
...scholarship, Director-Critic Peter Bogdanovich reviews the career of John Ford as if he were anatomizing the canon of Yeats. Ford, director of classic Americana from Stagecoach to The Grapes of Wrath to The Last Hurrah, is an artist of enormous sweep. But he has been guilty of certain venial sins, among them boozy sentimentality and the use of overfamiliar stock characters. In Bogdanovich's eyes every blemish is a virtue, and no detail is too trivial to examine. He traces, for example, the history of a gesture first used by Harry Carey and later mimicked by John Wayne...