Word: legerdemain
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This LOTR can't match Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas martial-arts extravaganza Ką for soaring athleticism or technical legerdemain. The visualization of battle scenes is often pedestrian, and toward the end, the choreography makes the Orcs look less like brutal mercenaries than clumsy backup singers. But if the show's ingenuity stumbles now and then, its narrative is always clear and plangent. It locates the melancholy soul at the heart of Tolkien's adventure story...
Last week, as if by legerdemain, Reagan and Gorbachev leaped out of the tape cans simultaneously 5,000 miles apart, proclaiming 1986 a "year of peace." Early estimates suggest that as many as 60 million Americans may have seen Gorbachev in an ornate Kremlin chamber urge "saving up, bit by bit, the most precious capital there is--trust among nations and peoples." That's the lingo of capitalists, and it must have found its mark. There was only a smattering of complaints from viewers who preferred to see the Rose Parade or the soap All My Children. No such gripes...
...creation of a group of separate tribal "homelands," in which all of the country's blacks would eventually have theoretical citizenship, even though most would continue to live where they always had, in the black townships of white-ruled South Africa. By this curious bit of legerdemain, the Afrikaners hoped to keep in check the potential political power of blacks, who now number 23.9 million, compared with the whites' 4.9 million, the 2.9 million coloreds, and the nearly 1 million people of Indian descent...
...Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious award. On the right is Japanese architect Arata Isozaki's furrowed wafer of glass and steel, buttressed by diagonal struts that seem almost too slender for their supporting role. And between them is Libeskind's contribution, a supreme bit of architectural legerdemain. It's a curving tower doing what should be, for a building, the impossible. Doing it very suavely too. It's taking...
...Psychological or atmospheric horror is what's attracting audiences these days," says Roy Lee, the Korean American who sold The Ring and Ju-on to Hollywood. It attracts producers too, since atmospherics cost less than computer legerdemain. But you don't have to be Japanese to scare people smartly. You need only a potent idea and $200,000. That was the budget for Open Water, based on the true story of an American couple who were left behind on Australia's Great Barrier Reef by a scuba boat...