Word: tonic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Stowaway in the Sky dangles a grandfather and a grandson from an orange balloon, and wanders, lazy as a cloud, over the fair land of France. Filmed from a helicopter in exquisite mutations of color, Stowaway is a treat for the eye and a tonic to the spirit...
With the usual whiff of flackery, commuters making the maiden voyage were given life memberships in the Commuter Yacht Club, entitling them to be "piped aboard upon returning home after a hard day at the office; to demand inordinate quantities of lime in gin and tonic as a prevention against scurvy; to address the cruiser pilot as 'Mr. Christian.' " Burbled one enchanted voyager: "What's Venice got on Chicago...
...Thousand Clowns (by Herb Gardner ) performs the delightful trick of turning nonconformity into a comedy instead of a cause. It is a first play written well enough to be a third or fourth play, and a bracing spring tonic for Broadway's ailing comic muse...
...falls down, the audience packs up, and all dialogue, even the best, reduces itself to threatening, because patterned, gibberish, the quality of dramatic action becomes infected by a kind of eccentric Spieltrieb, the aesthetic play of the "humorous" cripple. To act upon the assumptions of a rejected humanism is tonic, or at least good for kick, and wry glimpses of a hypothetical salvation may still be achieved in the pick-up bed. This is the mother vein of romantic irony, clowning in the densely-populated limbo between "infinite will" and "confined execution...
...slowly persuade her to imagine they were really in love - or perhaps persuade her to remember they were really in love. Does it matter which? What is reality, if not what one thinks it is? Resnais finds an abstruse answer to his question. Reality, he suggests, is a Pla tonic allegory, in which human experiences are merely the image and shadow of divine things, in which human lives, like crystals, fulfill a cosmic lattice. Specifically. Resnais suggests that hero and heroine represent The Eternal Masculine and The Eternal Feminine, which stand impersonal in stone and larger than life...