Word: artlessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Listening to this avant-rock band's new album is like arriving late to a mystery movie. You wonder, "Have I missed something?" In the case of Terror Twilight, you haven't. About a third of the songs on this album lack musical coherence, substituting aimless dissonance and artless artiness for melody and emotion. On a few tracks, however, Pavement lives up to its cerebral reputation; these boast a smart mix of studied elegance and ethereal sweetness. Still, this is a band that needs to replace indulgence with consistency...
...people talking--drama and life in its essence. The camera, manned by Bergman's master cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, holds on the actors' faces as they pour or spit out their lines. The film could lie there, inert and artless as an episode of an afternoon soap opera. It doesn't; it brings old rancors and flames alive. These troubled folks might be your parents...
...nothing in Ulysses is truly random. Beneath the surface realism of the novel, its apparently artless transcription of life's flow, lurks a complicated plan. Friends who were in on the secret of Ulysses urged Joyce to share it, to make things easier for his readers. He resisted at first: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of ensuring one's immortality...
...together pretty well. Rimes has a natural, saucy way about her in front of the camera, and Peters does a more than creditable job of convincing the viewer she is from the Ozarks. Probably because we know it is a 14-year-old's fairy tale, the story seems artless and winning, rather than just ridiculous. The person who really makes it all work is Rebecca Schull as Rimes' grandmother. Tender, bright, steady, Schull succeeds in making you actually care whether Grandma Teeden pulls through. In a flashback she visits the Rimes character (played here by a little girl...
Bujold has the frazzled hauteur of an aging, neglected star, and Spelling is nicely glazed, studiously artless. But the film is keyed to Posey's performance: perfectly brittle, faultlessly false. As the most toxic of this family of vipers, she creeps and stings, and no one dares look away...