Word: paeans
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...Sunday is a distinctly unconvincing celebration of motorcycle racing by Bruce Brown, who made the wildly successful surfing paean The Endless Summer in 1966. Brown's enthusiasm for his subjects is unbounded, and On Any Sunday shares with its predecessor a kind of gosh-all-fishhooks fascination with the rituals of sporting risk. But whereas The Endless Summer has marvelous scenery of rolling seas, On Any Sunday offers only roaring motors. For a very long 95 minutes, Brown unreels footage of racers: surging around a track or scrambling cross-country, gunning their motors to assault a peak in Utah...
...interested in everything, from the nap of a rabbit's fur or the extra legs on a mutant pig to the theory of human proportion. His graphic work was a sustained paean to the diversity of the world. There was often an edge of apocalyptic menace in the way he perceived it. He wrote a treatise on proportion, but he was shaken by portents, frightened by monsters and preyed on by nightmares?all of which he described and to some degree exorcised by drawing them. But his curiosity remained insatiable, and it drove him to constant journeying...
...South Viet Nam that Thieu is Washington's favorite. Last year, after all, Richard Nixon described Thieu as one of the "five or six greatest statesmen" in the world today. No matter how neutral the U.S. appears, Thieu is not likely to let the voters forget that overblown paean...
...blatant but inept imitation of Point Blank. While the violence in Point Blank defines some surreal and chilling points about the savagery of contemporary urban life, the mayhem in Get Carter is a gruesome and almost pornographic visual obsession. Fledgling DirectorMike Hodges clearly hoped to put together a jazzy paean to the classic detective story; the film's protagonist, in fact, is shown in a couple of scenes poring over a copy of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. But Hodges seems to have learned more from Mickey Spillane...
...derision Wolfe heaps on Felicia Bernstein's Mary Astor accent towers over the loving paean he delivers to Carol Doda's plasticene breasts. But then Felicia is in, really in, and Carol, however notoriously, was always out. Felicia is the obvious target for the satirist's scorn. Wolfe could laugh with poor Carol, at her audience and at herself, but he can only laugh at dear Felicia. And so a sharpness enters his voice where it did not previously exist...