Word: cartoonishly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Obsession, when it takes hold, is not a fragrance but a lethal gas. It envelops and consumes us; it is all the air we breathe. It should make for an ideal film subject. But moviemakers rarely know what to do with obsession. They make it trivial, cartoonish. A superfiend itches to blow up the planet -- big hairy deal. An id-monster like Freddy Krueger dices and slices kids as they sleep. Zzzzzz...
...production itself is another matter. Rather than trusting the music to make its effect, Graham Vick offers instead a cartoonish and superfluous gloss on the sardonic opera. Vick, the director of productions for the Glyndebourne Festival, and his all-British production team have set the action in the deprived consumer hell of the Soviet 1950s: Katerina's erotic fantasies, for example, run to materialistic visions of brides wielding vacuum cleaners. $ Symbols of heavy industry like cranes, tractors and forklifts move props (such as Katerina's marital bed) on and off stage, and Katerina's feckless husband is buried...
...typical all-male rock band is a roiling bouillabaisse of sexual competition and desire, and that is reflected in the music. "There is a different atmosphere in a coed band," says drummer Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, a pioneering male-and-female group. Coed bands usually avoid cartoonish, bombastic sexuality except to ridicule it. Their songs often seek to understand the differences between the genders, and they are often painfully self-critical. Lyrics to Frente!'s Labour of Love go, "I don't know how I bent/ What you said to what I believe you meant." Says N'Dea Davenport...
Americans inhabit, so to speak, two parallel realities. There is the virtual reality created by media spinning and cultural circuses and gladiatorial spectacles of exemplary pseudomoral combat (Harding v. Kerrigan, Bobbitt v. Bobbitt) -- an intimate cartoonish universe where the member is severed and sewn back on. And then there is the reality of . . . reality. Places like, say, Bosnia and Haiti belong to the reality of reality...
...video), a sound track, a theme-park attraction, an ice show, a lunch-box and T-shirt decoration and, as of last week, a Broadway musical. Actually, not just a Broadway musical but the costliest and most complex ever, not to mention maybe the most vapid, shallow and, yes, cartoonish...