Word: bleaknesses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...film is more than a bit bleak. As they enter the medieval abbey, William and Adso are first approached by an aged, Peter Lorre-type monk (William Hickey), who looks at Adso with his half-blind, lustful eyes and tells him that there is something "diabolical, even feminine" about the monastery. Even the gargoyles are creepy, with skull images where stalagmites once were...
Vagabond is powerful primarily because of its atmosphere--the way it turns bleak, open stretches of landscape into symbols of freedom, and thus manages to turn a young girl's random travels into a symbolic human odyssey. Until the end, you feel the movie is as much about the people she's met as about Mona herself, with a little about humanity in general thrown in. Mona's death scene at the end of the film completely destroys the subtle mood it has worked so hard to create, but regardless of the disappointing end, the fascinated detachment with which...
...that picture lay in its relocation of that classic device of the horror genre, the haunted house. Instead of being a Gothic pile isolated on a bleak moor, it was a spaceship visiting an unwelcoming planet in an obscure corner of the universe. But the situation was the immemorial one: a monster, in this case an alien life-form requiring human hosts for gestation, is stalking the spaceship's endless, ill-lighted corridors, picking off victims one by one. But there was only one creature, six frightened earthlings and little more subtext (or, for that matter, dialogue) to the film...
City dwellers think of nature "as a garden, or a view framed by a window," he writes, but peasants and sailors know better. "Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise . . . fearsomely indifferent . . . It is within this bleak natural context that beauty is encountered, and the encounter is by its nature sudden and unpredictable . . . This is why it moves us." After arguing that "art is always a form of prayer," Berger closes with a quick touch of irony: "The white wooden bird is wafted by the warm air rising from the stove in the kitchen where...
...resignation, the Arab oil embargo, the Iranian hostage crisis. Jimmy Carter was apparently overwhelmed by the presidency. The Club of Rome's Spenglerian predictions about the earth's shrinking resources shadowed the '70s, and Carter at last announced that there was a malaise in the land. The drift was bleak: things would get worse and worse and never get better again. Reagan's immediate predecessors were smudged by a darkness of failure and were all unhorsed by events they lost control of. Reagan's psychic weather is bright sunshine, and so far he has managed to keep the world from...