Word: findings
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...chocolatier will perhaps evoke for sardonic viewers the old dope peddler of Tom Lehrer's song, "spreading joy wherever [s]he goes." Indeed, some of the desserts apparently contain aphrodisiacs. The movie itself may suggest to those who find themselves unsusceptible to its fabulistic charms how easy it has become to travesty the manner of what used to be thought of as "art movies." This one has something of their air--an attractive, slightly exotic setting; characters who appear to have some substance and some curious quirks. But everything is spun toward sugary sentimentality...
...character faces the audience at the beginning of a play and starts narrating the story--it's the most overused device in modern theater, a refuge for authors who find it easier to tell rather than dramatize. But when Jane Eyre, the heroine of Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel, presents herself at the start of a Broadway show and addresses the "gentle audience," it is oddly refreshing. It promises something we rarely see in theater these days: old-fashioned, Victorian, what-happens-next? storytelling...
...Caird don't seem up to the story's more difficult physical challenges: a fire set in Rochester's bedroom in the middle of the night, or Jane's first encounter with Rochester, when he is thrown from a horse on his way home. If you can't find a way to stage a horse accident convincingly, you might as well have the fellow just walk in the front door...
...solid-core ammunition, essential for tank warfare, and the present supply from China will cease once Hitler breaks his nonaggression pact with Stalin. Portugal has wolfram, and Felsen speaks Portuguese, a memento from his past affair with a Brazilian woman. Ergo, Felsen will go to Portugal and somehow find 3,000 tons of wolfram per year to ship back to Germany...
...fact, some thriller fans may feel that Wilson drags out the suspense a tad longer than is strictly necessary. But more patient readers will find plenty to divert them along the way. Coelho, for example, is not simply a plot functionary but an interesting and sympathetic character in his own right, a widower still grieving for his wife, killed a year earlier in a car accident, and uneasily trying to raise a daughter about the same age as the murder victim. And Wilson's descriptions often achieve epigrammatic power. Here is Felsen visiting bombed-out Berlin near...