Word: wittedly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Francis Bacon's, at 65, bears witness to the preservative effect of doing what you feel like, no matter how extreme, when you feel like it, no matter how late the hour. "I don't really care about my life," says Bacon. "I've led a very hypnotic and curious one - being homosexual I have lived with the most marvelously disastrous people. Of course one suffers. You like somebody and you suffer from it. But that's how life is." Born the son of a horse trainer in Ireland, raised in a thick atmosphere of decayed...
None of this means that the film is less cheeky (or less visually sumptuous) than its predecessor. It is merely a modest claim that its director is something more than a nimble comic stylist. He has the good satirist's indispensable quality, moral indignation, and the wit to show it only in bright, bitter, almost subliminal flashes. Perforce less of a surprise than The Three Musketeers, and perhaps a little sketchier in plotting and characterization. The Four Musketeers disappoints only because we know that there is not enough film left in the can to bring D'Artagnan...
...plotted out and done up with competence, so it does not look like the usual sleazy horror flick. For a yarn like this to work at all, though, the elfin imagination of a John Collier or Roald Dahl is indispensable. The authors and director of Homebodies have no such wit...
...plots of 1930's musicals was the sharp, witty give-and-take between characters--Aline MacMahon fighting with Guy Kibbee, for example. But the pace is so slow in Bogdanovich's film--most of the time the actors shout to each other from across a room--that the little wit he put into the script gets swallowed up by the chandeliers. And Astaire needed the foil of stupid, stuffy Edward Everett Horton to show off his own urbanity. Reynold's counterpart to Horton is his mother, normally silly Mildred Natwick, who breezes in and out in two scenes with exceptional...
Harvey Swados finished Celebration shortly before dying of a brain hemorrhage three years ago at the age of 52. The novel has the virtues one cherished in Swados' fiction: decency, compassion and a gentle wit. Yet the book suffers from what was always Swados' noble flaw as a novelist: a talent never quite up to the demands he put upon...