Word: shipboard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...from the confidence of the gilded age to the imperial anxieties of the cold war; from a portrait by Thomas Eakins to a green humanoid by William Baziotes; from Stanford White's classicism to the democratic boxes of post- World War II Levittown; from Alfred Stieglitz's immigrants on shipboard to Robert Frank's visions of the underface of big-city America...
Covington, as McDonald re-creates him in earthy, economical prose, is a cheerful believer in the biblical doctrines that Darwin's work will so thoroughly overturn. The recipient of a shipboard education in basic Christianity, yet brimming over with animal high spirits, Covington roams the wilds of South America, bringing down exotic birds by day and happily sinning away his nights with a succession of willing women. He's not a student of evolution but evolution's happy product, strong and shrewd and lusty. A nature boy. The irony is that this makes him the perfect tool of a scientific...
...Laurel and Hardy--think a snappier Saps at Sea--except that the Stan and Ollie here are Tucci and co-star Oliver Platt. Tucci, incapable of a gross moment even in the slapstick, seasick exertions of shipboard burlesque, nicely approximates Laurel's high, piping whine as counterpoint to Platt's unctuous exasperation. They are two actors stowed away on a '40s-ish ocean liner, ever scurrying from a British stage star who wants them arrested, gelded, dead. Also onboard are a deposed queen (Isabella Rossellini), a gay tennis player (Billy Connolly), a Teutonic chief steward (Campbell Scott) and a suicidal...
World War I, with its machines that dealt death rather than hope, further darkened the view of things to come. In 1927 the famous German moviemaker Fritz Lang released Metropolis, the idea for which came to him when he first saw, from shipboard, the glaring lights and tall buildings of Manhattan. (The film became a favorite of Hitler's.) Set in the year 2000, Metropolis shows plutocrats living in idle pleasure while workers slave away underground until a spectacular rebellion sets them free. This was reminiscent of H.G. Wells' 1895 dystopian fantasy, The Time Machine, in which a subhuman race...
...Titanic, it turns out, is no disaster, just an uninspired shipboard melodrama with watery songs, predictable musings about the hubris of the enterprise, and a surfeit of cliched characters. They include the ship's craven owner, who keeps urging the captain to increase the speed; aristocrats like the John Jacob Astors and the Isidor Strauses, who drown with dignity; and some tiresomely idealistic Irish immigrants in steerage. What director Richard Jones and scenic designer Stewart Laing have accomplished, however, is an imaginative, even haunting, stage rendering of the sinking: the stage tilts ominously; faces of the doomed passengers appear...