Word: wildering
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This property also has a history: as a successful Broadway play, then as a Billy Wilder movie starring three beloved figures, Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. And, as you'll recall, it has a nice little story to tell too. It's the one about the chauffeur's daughter (Julia Ormond), living over the garage on a vast Long Island estate, in love since childhood with David (Greg Kinnear), the playboy living up the driveway. When she grows up and he notices her, that threatens his engagement, which in turn threatens the merger of two family firms that...
...updating the script, Barbara Benedek and David Rayfiel have too often substituted topical one-liners (some of them quite funny) for well-joined badinage. This has a distancing effect. Even worse, someone made a disastrous decision to lengthen the early sequence in which Sabrina finds herself in Paris. Wilder got through her maturation at montage speed; Pollack lingers over it for 20 inconsequential minutes, a bring-down from which the movie never quite recovers...
...other words, they have fussed with Sabrina, but they have not really engaged it. They have not found the little twinges of pain, the awkward stumbles into vulnerability, that animate the best comedies, and the best love stories too. Wilder's film had a few of them--enough to ensure that the movie and its audience did not feel totally manipulated--but nothing on the grand scale of Thompson's great blowout...
...noblest in Sabbath, and perhaps in Roth, is the coming-full-circle, the rejoining of ends. Recalling his Jersey Shore childhood, Sabbath is a modern day Thornton Wilder: "There was a man in Belmar who sold only bananas, and he hired Morty and Morty hired me. The job was to go along the streets hollering 'Bananas, twenty-five cents a bunch!' What a great job. I still sometimes dream about that job. You got paid to shout 'Bananas...
...truly blind and deaf to the plans, why did the security service fail to act? This key, and so far unanswered, question has spawned a host of conspiracy theories. Right-wing circles are calling Raviv an agent provocateur who purposefully incited anti-Rabin fanaticism. An alternate, even wilder theory holds that Shin Bet actually plotted a faked assassination attempt in order to smear opponents of the peace process. Under this scenario agents supposedly gave Amir a gun loaded with blanks, but his brother betrayed the Shin Bet by substituting real bullets...