Word: escapist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...even though the conclusion synthesizes the two styles incompletely, leaving the moviegoer wondering if something important was inadvertently left on the cutting room floor, Baker Boys still fits snugly into the escapist tradition of Tinseltown. The artistic commentary and other "Deep Inner Meanings" are introduced far too late to be developed well enough to tug at the viewer's mind...
...everything to right, and the lovers awaken with the morning lark only to suspect that it was all a dream. Love is blind, and its victims are mad, the poet suggests, but only for a night, a brief, forgetful spell. Perhaps even in 1600 that might have seemed an escapist thought; in 1989, however, a midsummer night's dream may be our best hope of a happy ending...
...everyone is enamored of the style: Architecture Professor Frank Dimster, at the University of Southern California, calls the Santa Fe look "cinema architecture," an ultimately escapist style designed to comfort rather than challenge. Even some of its champions view its proliferation with alarm. "It's become too much a style," says Kellen, who has begun to shy away from using the Southwestern aesthetic. "A lot of people who don't understand it that well are making a cartoon...
Artists are known for what they push away as well as for what they embrace. So it was with Paul Gauguin, who for a century has fired the escapist imagination with his rejection of conventional life and academic painting for la vie Tahitienne and a bold new art. Paul Gauguin: Life and Work, by Michel Hoog (Rizzoli; 332 pages; $85), presents the Gauguin legend on a grand scale, from the artist's exotic Peruvian boyhood to his South Seas idyll. Hoog, chief curator at Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris, integrates the painter's biography with a broad representation...
...comedy become so glum loving? Part of it can be attributed to the medium's cyclical swings. When the provocative Norman Lear comedies of the early '70s went out of fashion, sitcoms retreated to escapist fluff; now realism and relevance are coming back into vogue. The networks, moreover, are fond of high-profile, easily promotable episodes that can draw attention to a series. ("Next week on I Love Valerie: a crack dealer moves into the neighborhood.") Equally important, many writers and producers, tired of feeding the sitcom gag machine, are looking for ways to stretch the old formulas. Says Hugh...