Word: statically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...great sounds. Rock, like blues, is the art of emotional music--basic music, which, although it is often electric and artificial, is always simple. The sounds in I am the Walrus are designed too often to transmit literal ideas instead of feelings. For instance, there is a screen of static between the singer and the listener, the sound that a weak radio makes late at night. This is apparently to indicate that the Beatles are having a hard time getting through to their audience through all the haze of mass media. The music sets the tone for the lyrics...
...motif of division and isolation. Concrete architectural elements abound in certain sequences, carrying with them an implication of desolation and sterility. Repeated images of speeding trains come to be emblems of the growing disorder of the characters' emotional lives. Similarly, in a film which is built around static compositions and slow, graceful movements, all rapid pans and tracks come to carry a suggestion of disruption...
...slapstick business, nice details of external characterization, and the blocking of any largish group. He shows less command when he has a small, intimate scene at hand, but when he errs, he does so in the direction of emphasizing frenetic movement, which has a special comic advantage over the static set-ups so familiar to Harvard stages...
...Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. Sequences, especially those leading up to a shooting match, look like they're filmed in slow motion. They aren't. It's just that the camera--instead of sticking to a man, dogging him step by step--focuses on what's static around him. Expanses of desert or mountain or sun-bleached wall. So the violence that ensues seems less the result of cowboy determination than of fate...
...Archer novels are laced with strange and wonderful accomplishments. The two masterpieces, The Chill and The Zebra Striped Hearse are as different in narrative approach as two mysteries rooted in perverse family situations could be. The first is an intensive, static exploration of personal and criminal relationships in a tiny California college, while the second is a novel in motion, sprawling over the whole Southwest and Mexico. But each of these divergent books works a similar splendid change on one of the shopworn tricks of the mystery trade, the revelation of guilt which confutes the reader's expectations. MacDonald transforms...