Word: conceits
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CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. Steven Spielberg takes a breather from sci-fi/adventure romps and historical morality plays to dust off his moribund ‘lost boy’ conceit, reigniting it to power this breezy, rambling 1960s-set caper. Leonardo DiCaprio spends the movie perpetrating a richly entertaining string of identity cons and check fraud that Spielberg tempers with rather obvious meditations on the state of the nuclear family. Amidst the mischief and philosophizing, Tom Hanks, as the dry, wry FBI man tailing DiCaprio, ends up stealing the movie by internalizing his ‘decent everyman?...
...Yasser Arafat is an evildoer who has never intended to make peace. He winks at terrorism; he tries to purchase arms from the Iranians. He flirts with peace, then flees. The ideological argument has the subtlety of a punch in the nose: it is based in the Sharon-Likud conceit that Arabs "only understand" strength. This has a certain resonance with tough guys like Rumsfeld and Cheney. America's Likudnik tilt has empowered the Sharon government to preside over a dramatic increase in illegal - that is, unapproved - West Bank settlements: 70 new outposts in Palestinian areas, many of them tended...
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. Steven Spielberg takes a breather from sci-fi/adventure romps and historical morality plays to dust off his moribund ‘lost boy’ conceit, reigniting it to power this breezy, rambling 1960s-set caper. Leonardo DiCaprio spends the movie perpetrating a richly entertaining string of identity cons and check fraud that Spielberg tempers with rather obvious meditations on the state of the nuclear family. Amidst the mischief and philosophizing, Tom Hanks, as the dry, wry FBI man tailing DiCaprio, ends up stealing the movie by internalizing his ‘decent everyman?...
...imagine this intricate intertwining of historically and geographically separate lives working as a literary conceit. Indeed, Michael Cunningham won a Pulitzer Prize for it with his novel The Hours. While a reader can imagine Woolf and the others, a movie must literally flesh out fictional creations, and so a certain unfortunate literalness of presentation creeps into the picture. Watching The Hours, one finds oneself focusing excessively on the unfortunate prosthetic nose Kidman affects in order to look more like the novelist. And wondering why the screenwriter, David Hare, and the director, Stephen Daldry, turn Woolf, a woman of incisive mind...
...Roach - and in his film reproduced a dozen of them, with an archaeologist's fidelity. For the Broadway version Waters is listed as "consultant"; he claims he was much too bossy ever to collaborate. He also knew that the shoe would have "new" songs; the pastiche conceit embraced not only the ransacking of tacky 50s-60s modes of decor, coiffure and couture but the rephrasing of less-than-classic Brill Building song styles...