Word: vessel
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...moments of stress, Alicia Silverstone has the adorable and quite marketable habit of squinting -- as if trying to read a TelePrompTer or possibly hatch a thought. This makes the 18-year-old actress the ideal vessel for Clueless, an enjoyable movie that says a lot about the needs of Americans, and not just teens, in the mid-'90s. The tale has Cher (Silverstone), a popular high-schooler in Beverly Hills, toiling as a matchmaker, as her father's confidant, as a makeover adviser to a clumsy friend (Brittany Murphy) and as her stepbrother's nemesis. All this echoes the plot...
Powell's views on specific political issues are not fully articulated, and most Americans see him largely in policy-neutral terms. Thus he is something of an empty ideological vessel into which voters pour their own beliefs. But in the scores of speeches he has given since his retirement as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the message he has crafted is a brilliantly balanced mix of conservative values and a somewhat liberal view of the proper role of government...
...minimalist epic of sex and longing in the age of aids, again has decay and estrangement in mind. This scarily confident, beautifully acted study is gnomic and anomic, like a TV disease movie made in an alternate universe. And in Moore's pretty, aggrieved face, Haynes finds the ideal vessel for his concerns...
...Todd Haynes has made a scarily confident movie about a suburban wife (Julianne Moore) who is "allergic to the 20th century." "Safe" tells of her attempts to understand and conquer her condition at a "chemical-free zone in New Mexico." Moore's beautifully acted performance gives the director the vessel to present his questions about suburbia, the environment and 12-step programs. "The brazen majesty of Haynes' approach," says Corliss, is that "he spills no secrets, makes no obvious judgments. Safe is its own unique thing...
Arcadia offers the heartening spectacle of a dramatist who, with commendable industry, has found the unusual but handsome vessel into which most of his obsessions neatly fit. And Stoppard makes it look easy. With Arcadia, he has fabricated a work as simple as a perfect cube and as complex as the physics of a breaking wave. Or make that the physics of the turbulent air in a room where many people are clapping...