Word: cocteau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...originality. His novels dealt with subjects most French readers of his day found seedy at best: drag queens, hustlers, thieves, sailors having sex with each another. But he wrote these stories in a highly ornamental prose which dazzled readers and made him a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and Alberto Giacommetti. As the usually modest Genet put it in a moment of pride, "There was the French language and then there...
...first part of the book interweaves Genet's early years with excerpts from his highly autobiographical novels, creating a rich fabric of the facts and the fiction they gave rise to. The biography tracks Genet to Paris, where he became Cocteau's literary find, his "golden thug," and later, Sartre's "pet queer." White imbues even the most frequently told stories with a novel charm. His recreation of the De Beauvoir-Sartre headquarters at the Cafe Deux Magots is sardonic and affectionate, and the deliciously lengthy and opinionated portrait of Cocteau could stand on its own as a study...
...point when Genet the little-known outlaw became Genet the national treasure (who then had trouble finding anything to write about). White places the beginning of this dry spell in 1949. That was the year the French president, in response to a letter written by Sartre and Cocteau and signed by a slew of intellectuals, issued Genet a pardon for a possible life sentence. The pardon represented an official endorsement by the French government, its reigning man of letters and its most famous philosopher; it was a terrible blow to Genet the outsider, one that kept him from writing seriously...
...public, her extravagant affairs -- with actors, musicians and athletes -- added to the legend. But her legacy is the voice. Penetrating, with a wide, natural vibrato, it had an urgency of emotion that touched everyone, from the misbegotten of the meanest quartier to the most refined boulevardiers. Jean Cocteau, who died within hours of Piaf, called her a genius: "There has never been another like her . . . and there never will be." He compared her to a nightingale, but the impresario who discovered Edith Giovanna Gassion at 19, singing on the corner of a Paris avenue, had bestowed a more fitting name...
Villains? How did they get loose in this gun-free Utopia? Therein lies the simple tale Demolition Man has to tell. For all its sanctimoniousness, San Angeles is a fascist state. Its smooth-spoken leader, Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne), is annoyed by a persistent band of rebels, living where such folk always do in fictions like this, in the city's underground passages. There they cook hamburgers (well, actually, they're ratburgers), swill beer and dream of cholesterol's restoration. To deal with the outlaws, Cocteau frees a killer named Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) from cryogenic prison (they took...