Word: vivid
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Casting the film, Scott tested Jude Law for Commodus but went with Phoenix, an odd, inspired choice: beneath the villain's sliminess is an unloved child with vivid plans for vengeance. Scott's choice of Nielsen also was resisted, but the Danish beauty brings a regal presence to the film. The boozy, exuberant Reed gave a superbly knowing performance--alas, his last. He died toward the end of shooting; one scene was accomplished with a body double and some digital legerdemain (which also added tiers to the Colosseum). Crowe, deep into his Jeffrey Wigand character in The Insider, was persuaded...
Bellow's career is a vivid reminder that the law is an important defense for the disadvantaged. He once observed, "We discovered the best legal education America had to offer didn't teach us how to get someone out of a cellblock." In remembering Bellow we remember to vigilantly watch and work so that all Americans know that they can find recourse in the law, equally...
...that is too bloodless a description of Bellow's signature accomplishment. Again, as always before, he portrays people with ideas--sometimes good, sometimes wacky--bumping into one another and sparking unpredictable reactions. Seasoned Bellow readers do not look forward to what will happen next but rather to what his vivid characters will think and then, invariably, say the next time they meet and argue...
Another challenge is understanding how the mere darting of ions and oozing of neurochemicals can create the vivid first-person present-tense subjective experience of colors, sounds, itches and epiphanies that make up the self--the soul, if you will. There's no doubt that physiological brain activity is the cause of experience. Thoughts and feelings can be started, stopped or altered by electricity and chemicals, and they throw off signals that can be read with electrodes and other assays. I also have little doubt that we will crack the mystery of consciousness, in the sense of which brain events...
...thing, flag burning (even though it occurs rarely) originated as one of the vivid, button-pushing ur-outrages committed during the great '60s deconstruction of American authority (which some boomers consider to be the beginning of the world) and engraved on the national memory by photographs of the time - merging with black-and-white shots of an Abbie Hoffman type giving the finger to "Amerika," or of the student radical Mark Rudd smirking and smoking a cigar with his feet up on the desk of the president of Columbia University. Burning the flag has a force of primal, even Oedipal...