Word: witchingly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Davis, a brilliant actress, is wasted as the strung-out, borderline-psychotic ex who comes to Harry's apartment looking for retribution. In Allen's 1992 Husbands and Wives, she delivered a devastatingly accurate performance in a not dissimilar role; here, she may as well be Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Alley's character is similarly distorted, creating a disturbing (and aggravating) trend for the film. Why won't Allen let us get close to the characters? It's this closeness that made so many of his other films work, and the denial of which ultimately kills this...
...reasonable, [but] as a member of a crowd he at once becomes a blockhead." Schiller said that. Why does it happen? The "apocalypse now" theory has to do with the odd historical fact that people get exceptionally nervous as they near the end of any era. There were witch-hunts in the 1690s, episodes of hysteria in the 1890s. In our own time, one has only to reach back a couple of years to recall large-scale group fears induced by mention of the ozone layer, or by pandemics like toxic-shock syndrome, the Gulf War syndrome and the Ebola...
...masks and body paint to indulge in public foreplay. Already costumes are almost de rigueur, replacing even airline uniforms. I know this because I spent last Halloween evening between planes in a major hub airport, feeling distinctly awkward in slacks and blazer because the ticket agent was a playful witch and the devil himself X-rayed my bags...
...across the land, the people rejoiced as the wicked witch's spell was broken ... well, perhaps not, but those who feared the coming of Windows 98 have been given a reprieve ? and the folks at Netscape will certainly be rubbing their hands with glee...
...story that comes closest to Wolff's stunningly rendered "Powder" is "Transactions" by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff (No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng). As wonderfully bizarre as it poetic, it tells the story of a traveling salesman hawking American goods and culture ("Witch hazel. Superman. Band-Aids, Zane Grey. Chili Con carne...Camels") on a Caribbean island who buys a poor German girl that he finds on the roadside. Before taking the girl home to his sterile wife, they go to an enchanted spring/hotel/tourist attraction run by a woman with an obsession with Jet magazine...