Word: elegist
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...Raimi calls Woo's "supercharged adrenaline" -- the reckless intelligence he applies to solving the most familiar action scenes -- is evident in each precise, superpotent frame. He could be a cleaner, leaner Sam Peckinpah, or Sergio Leone: the next generation. And in his best work, Woo is a critic and elegist of movie manhood. His Vietnam film, the amazing A Bullet in the Head, is an atrocity picture with a conscience -- an unflinching Asian view of the politics of testosterone, of the crimes all races of men are capable of committing...
...question is not exactly new, but it has rarely been posed more deftly and disarmingly than in the 21st work of the wistful comedist A.R. Gurney, whose best previous plays (Sweet Sue, Love Letters) also centered on the disruptive consequences of love unpursued. Gurney is often pegged as an elegist for the waning Wasp. In Later Life he makes great efforts to usher in characters outside that stereotype. They are Irish, Jewish, Texan and techno-nerd; one woman is a lesbian, one man gay, and these two fully transcend sketch comedy to offer poignant glimpses of self-destructive lives. Predictably...
...nonfiction, in fact, his principal role has been that of a warning bell and an elegist, trying to rescue traditional values and forgotten instincts from the ravages of progress. ("Modern time, mon, modern time," runs the knelling refrain of Far Tortuga.) "The world is losing its grit and taste," he says with feeling. "The flavor of life is going." And he rises to highest eloquence when talking of the way ever brighter urban lights have caused a "loss of the night" -- the fading of the stars he knew as a boy and of the dark waters on Long Island Sound...
Harold Bloom deemed Eugene O'Neil "the elegist of the Freudian family romance, of the domestic tragedy of which we all die daily, a little bit at a time." Many of O'Neil's plays dredge up and dramatize explicitly autobiographical tragedies. But Long Day's Journey into Night is the work in which O'Neil finally felt "enabled to face my dead at last and write with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones...
Nobody does the cowboy blarney better than Larry McMurtry, elegist of the old Southwest and observer of the new culture in the Sunbelt, where the air conditioner is king. Yet his novels are not nearly as well known as the movies made from them. Horseman, Pass By is more recognizable as Hud. The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment have had far more viewers than readers. Lonesome Dove, McMurtry's tenth novel, is probably stampeding toward the screen at this moment. But first things first...