Word: banqueters
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That's the danger of a teeming cast of malefacting characters: they get jumbled in the viewer's mind, and slack-jawed apathy ensues. Novels can afford a rich banquet of personalities; it's what readers sign up for. But ratiocination isn't welcome in modern movies, which prefer visceral impact over intellect. Not that the film should kowtow to ignorance--only that it might have streamlined the dramatis personae, the better to concentrate on the plot...
...exoticism is somehow kept in check. Typical of Albarn's various cultural adventures, he doesn't attempt to pass as a local; the details and pentatonic scale may come from Chinese folk music, but the playful melodies are rooted in pop. The fluttering female voices on "Heavenly Peach Banquet" resolve as the la-la-la-la-las from Minnie Ripperton's "Lovin' You." "Iron Rod" sounds like R2-D2 rapping on a dance floor. "The Living Sea" is a ballad of such delicacy that it feels like a love song in any language. The music does a fair...
...Reges are having similar doubts. Just as credit-happy Americans are being brought low by a housing-market meltdown and slowing economic growth, so too are Indians learning the downside of personal debt. Over the past five years, Indian banks, finance companies and retailers introduced a Western-style banquet of financial products to the country's rising middle class, whose members began tapping credit cards, consumer loans and installment plans to buy automobiles, washing machines, vacations - all those trappings of upward mobility that the few who could afford them once proudly purchased with cash. The country's central bank estimates...
...recent farewell banquet hosted by Iraqi government officials for General David Petraeus, an aide to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki lauded the U.S. military chief's efforts to help bring violence down to levels not seen since early 2004. "We appreciate what you've done, General," the aide recalls saying, "but there's another American General who would be warmly and immediately embraced by all Iraqis, one who would help us even more...
...from Summer Hours - especially in the first 25 minutes, as Hélene hosts the family on one last bucolic weekend - is luxuriating in the milk bath of the film's good taste. I mean not just the lovely home with its period armoires and vases, but the full banquet of visual and aural felicities: the pretty grandchildren, the easy eloquence of the conversation, the Saint-Saens symphony of duck calls and birdsong, the perfect spiderweb of sunlight through the trees, which almost requires use of the word "dappled...