Word: sensualist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...intellectual and a sensualist, Cronenberg graces Crash with philosophical musings, acres of pretty flesh and even more penis talk than on some 8 o'clock sitcoms. For all that, Crash doesn't work. Sexual without being sexy, the film moves smoothly but slowly, like a Caddy on a revolving showroom platform. Dialogue scenes are conducted in a reverent whisper; only the brakes screech, just after a climax or before a death. Even the carnographic love play--in which each character has predictably weird sex with most of the others--is too studied. The fine actors disport themselves solemnly, like giant...
...obstacles in coming to terms with Liszt is the man's protean nature, which invites the common misapprehension of him as superficial. But as Walker's gripping narrative unfolds throughout the three volumes, the astounding depth as well as breadth of Liszt's legacy emerges. Yes, he was a sensualist, but it was also Liszt, tireless in his charity work, who invented the benefit concert, who realized the piano's vast potential and created the modern piano recital, who became the first modern conductor, concerned with musical lines, color and expression rather than simply beating time. As proselytizer he sped...
...work. All that these revealed was the vice of the autodidact-a mania for cultural name dropping. They read like Woody Allen. Thus Baseball, 1983-84, came garnished with references to Red Smith, Bill James, Velazquez, Durer, Max Brod, Satchel Paige and, of course, Kafka; while The Sensualist, 1973-84, was prefaced by quotes from Picasso ("My one and only master!") and Matisse ("It is undoubtedly to Matisse that I owe the most"). Then Kitaj: "Cazanne is my favourite painter too ... Maybe that's why he draws so many of us to him." Us: oh, come on. William Lieberman...
This is death to Cheever, whose nobility as a writer was in saving his characters from stereotype; he elevated the trials of those gray-flannel souls to a kind of sanctified anguish. He saw them from the inside. And because he was a sensualist in describing people who thought it their sad destiny to be prim, Cheever was able to create a kind of lyric poetry about the things he loved: the forced intimacy of Manhattan foot traffic, a beach house at midnight, the fidelity in a cocker spaniel's tilted glance, the tenseness in a young wife's posture...
...mortal self-contradiction of this exploration to the outermost of sensual consciousness is--to bring about the dilemma which is the storyline of the film, that is--a full exploration, through the three main characters (and the secondary as well) of how this threat of death alters their sensualist consciousness...