Word: realist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...something more on its mind than extending the privileges of upper-class sexual idiocy to people of--or newly emerged from--the contemporary American working class. For all the wildness of his plotting, Burns, expanding the territory he opened up in The Brothers McMullen, is at heart a realist of an interesting kind--cool, nonjudgmental, even genial. He is also a confident subversive, gnawing away at the notion, currently so popular in political circles, that average Americans, holding to traditional values, bulwark us against the virus of postmodern moral ambiguity. What he's saying in this marvelously dry, sly movie...
...past months at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and that opens this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it's that Homer was not just a fine American painter but one of the great realist artists of the 19th century as a whole, comparable in achievement to Manet or Courbet, if not Degas. The show's curators, Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly, have brought enormous scholarly energy to arguing this on the walls, winnowing Homer's 2,000 or so surviving works to some...
Such works remind you that the view of Homer that was current 20 years ago, and that this show corrects--that he was a realist in a simple and straightforward way--was wrong. It reckons without the deep strand of existential pessimism that runs in Homer's work and that creates its own symbolic structures. For Homer, as for another great and underrated artist, his contemporary Rudyard Kipling, man is at constant war with his surroundings in a world that cares nothing about him and gives him no natural allies. The moment you step from the social path, where security...
...This, Homer says, is what the voyage of life comes down to: hanging on and facing down your death when all hope is gone and there are no witnesses. It is a grim and hard-won vision, but in it, as in his descriptive powers, Homer remained supremely a realist...
...doing hysteria in a narrow range, and Buscemi scores as a sick goofus whom one witness IDs as "funny-lookin'--more than most people even." There's enough gore to make this a Mystery Violence Theater. After some superb mannerist films, the Coens are back in the deadpan realist territory of Blood Simple, but without the cinematic elan. Fargo is all attitude and low aptitude. Its function is to italicize the Coens' giddy contempt toward people who talk and think Minnesotan. Which is, y'know, kind of a bad deal...