Word: villainous
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...understand the opera until he accepts the fact that vocalism -good vocalism, that is-is the coagulant that binds everything and everybody together: fantasy and truth, performers and audience, hero and heroine. Says Domingo: "The voice must say I love you. Love for a heroine or hatred for a villain must be portrayed through the public." Domingo has the voice. He is acquiring a public ready and willing to jostle its way into the opera any night he chooses to sing...
...real villain is New York City's appallingly inefficient court system. In California, the law requires a trial within 60 days after arrest. In New York, defendants awaiting trial may languish in jail for months because the courts are so congested and the law sets no time limit. The congestion is partly due to aggressive defense attorneys, armed with recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions expanding the rights of defendants, who slow the process with pretrial motions on behalf of their clients. Still, there is no excuse for cases like that of one inmate: charged with murder, he has been...
Like an objets trouves sculptor, Director Claude Chabrol (La Femme Infidele) likes to give commonplaces a classic aspect. Is coincidence a cliche? Very well, then, the father, Charles Thenier (Michel Duchaussoy), learns the identity of the hit-and-run murderer by a convenient accident. Are villains too often betes noiresl The driver is a child-beating, wife-torturing, mistress-abusing salaud. Does the pursuer fall in love with his quarry-as Belmondo did with Deneuve in Mississippi Mermaid! The villain's mistress (Caroline Cellier) is a lodestar of beauty and melancholia. Naturally, Charles is smitten...
...police obtain the diary, which condemns its author. Or is the diary a plant? Has the father chosen to look so openly compromised that he must be innocent? The villain's teen-aged son has been receiving surreptitious history lessons from Charles. Has he fanned Oedipal notions in the youth's brain? Is a murderer the man who creates the idea or the instrument by which it is performed? Is Charles both or neither...
...danger, Lindsay suggested, is that ordinary citizens may soon grow impatient with trusting leaders and lawyers to enforce the law. "That trust is precious, and we are on the verge of losing it. And the real villain is our nation's priorities. Eighty billion dollars for defense and war abroad-less than $500 million for safety in our streets at home." Until the priorities are reordered, said Lindsay, the only realistic outlook is for more crime...