Word: conventions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...safely) gregarious friend, for whom a vow of chastity is too hideous to even contemplate, wondered erroneously, (while surreptitiously checking my palms for stigmata), whether this enterprise involved vows of poverty and celibacy. My high school friends from St. Josephs Convent gently reminded me of the rigors of life there and the reflexive crushing of attempts to depart from accepted doctrine...
When Mary Robinson was a young girl just out of convent school, her family sent her off to Paris for a year of finishing school. It was there, as an impressionable 17-year-old, that she came to an important realization about her native Ireland. Its historic insularity did not serve to protect its culture, but instead helped keep it in the shadow of the English. "A country like France had such a sense of itself that it could never be diluted," she recalls. "You don't homogenize a culture, you enrich it by diversity of contacts." Only by becoming...
...attempts to write papers about monasticism have been very encouraging--maybe because no one writes about nuns," says Burger, who spent a semester last year living in a Benedictine convent in France...
...HALF ITS LENGTH THE PICture shambles along, perfunctory, rhythmless, misdirected, wasting the time of the moviegoer who couldn't get into Lethal Weapon 3 next door. Then the ragged choir of St. Katherine's convent swings into a tambourine-rattling version of Smokey Robinson's My Guy -- "There's not a man today/ Who could take me away/ From my God" -- and Sister Act instantly enslaves its audience. A few more tunes, a chase, a conversion % (nowadays every movie needs one), and by its end, the picture exudes the odor of a summer...
Anyway, it stinks of calculation. The film -- about a Reno singer (Whoopi Goldberg) finding refuge from her gangster lover (Harvey Keitel) in a dilapidated convent run by staid Maggie Smith -- allows no room for irony, vagrant inspiration or air. There's something piquant about the look of Whoopi in a wimple, but the star must soar or sink with the vehicle, and this one is a bathysphere. Despite a nice turn by Kathy Najimy as a criminally chirpy nun and some inventive charts by ace arranger Marc Shaiman, Sister Act has corporate fingerprints smudging its smiling face...