Word: absented
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...does not love himself. Celia leaves him, which makes good sense but rather flat drama. What redeems the evening is McCowen's acting. He has a feel for the role that is as sensitive as a safecracker's fingertips. At one moment he is the bemused absent-minded professor, at another the twinkling champion of verbal pingpong, and at still another, an anguished human with a parched heart...
Auntie Mame would feel like a stranger in her creator's Paradise, Patrick Dennis' latest novel. The charisma, cheerful talent and canny sense of the absurd that brought fame to Mame are conspicuously absent this time. Too bad, because Dennis has invented a situation with comic possibilities. At the start of the tourist season an earthquake transforms an Acapulco resort into an island rocked by storms. Both amenities and necessities swiftly disappear. As Dennis' caricatures try to cope with life in the raw, long-distance television cameras grind away from the shore, picking up every grisly move...
...photograph can only capture an object; a drawing can liberate it. That phenomenon was not lost on Walt Disney, whose cartoons reveal a freedom noticeably absent from his "live" comedies. Nor is it lost on Chuck Jones, perhaps the foremost observer of the Disney fun factory. Scenarist-Director Jones, illustrator of many a Bugs Bunny and creator of Roadrunner, is the animating force behind The Phantom Tollbooth, his first full-length feature. It is based on Norton Juster's ten-year-old classic juvenile novel...
Meanwhile, the government is clamping down on slackers. This year has been designated "the Year of Productivity." New regulations have been introduced against el vago, the loafer. Cuban men from 17 to 60 who are chronically absent from work face up to two years on state farms. Women, however, are exempt. "Our people would not understand if we treated men and women alike," explains Labor Minister Jorge Risquet. Meanwhile Castro is weeding his Cabinet of those who, as he puts it, "have worn themselves out" in the revolution. Ominously, each change seems to bring more army officers into civilian Ministries...
McCarthy clearly finds in poetry an order and tranquillity absent from the world in which he achieved recognition. His meter, diction and rhetoric are traditional enough, as are his subjects: nature, religion, aging, death, love. They reveal a man with an abiding desire to be isolated, unclocked, unshackled by the limelight. At times this shows directly: "Beyond the coffin confines of telephone booths, my arms stretch to read, in vain." At times it appears obliquely: "Poor fish who knew the sea why did you dare...