Word: gleaming
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...picture of Herbert -face smudged with camouflage greasepaint, rifle gripped menacingly-illustrated a manual for elite Ranger trainees. His way through the Army was the fighter's way-training in mountaineering, as a parachutist, a Green Beret. With the rows of ribbons, the close-cropped haircut, the polished gleam of his uniform's brass, he was a five percenter, the top rank of officers promoted more quickly than their colleagues...
Oates manages the role of the fantasist faultlessly. His eyes gleam, his smile shifts. Sometimes his face seems to be under two separate spells, one side of it benign, the other twitching with intimations of violence. And occasionally Oates will let all his defenses collapse, as when GTO sits in a North Carolina roadside diner and abstractedly orders "champagne and caviar and chicken sandwiches on toast." Suddenly there is a despairing glimpse of a schizophrenic life cracked by thwarted dreams...
...then a few bits gleam. Hoffman's sluggish nasal metabolism is still amusing if familiar; Barbara Harris has a few moving moments as an auditioning singer with only three good notes; and the late David Burns is the archetypal Jewish father who seems to have sired every writer from Philip Roth to Erich Segal. But that troupe would be funny reading subway signs. Maybe more...
...fine camera eye. The novel suggests a suite of woodcuts; the earlier film was, appropriately, black-and-white gothic. Though this Wuthering Heights is in color, it is suggestive of death and transfiguration. The Yorkshire landscape has never seemed so malignant; filters block sunlight so that skies gleam while grounds are plunged in darkness, recalling the paintings of Magritte...
Karen Black, the most delightful piece of Five Easy Pieces, agrees. "Sex is a good subject," she says. "But if your sense of sex is covert and your ideas about sex bring an aberrated gleam to your eye, the scene is going to be below my level of acceptability." How's that again? "Sexuality has more to do with it than just going to bed with someone. It has to do with loving, listening, touching, making the other person happy." Joanna Shimkus (The Virgin and the Gypsy) is, like Ali MacGraw, a model turned actress?with a special, highly charged...