Word: ways
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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There are two things you have to say about Jackson Pollock: he figured out a way to paint as no one before him ever had, and he was, as a human being, a shambles--drunken, depressed, disloyal and near to moronically inarticulate. The only way to approach his short and miserable life (he died in a possibly suicidal car crash at age 44) is as an insoluble mystery, and that's precisely what Harris, the star, director and co-producer of Pollock, does...
...great performance has a kind of blank grimness; it contains not a single moment of charm or self-awareness. Harris never allows his exhibitions of Pollock's inexplicable gift to soften or redeem the man's monstrousness. The result is a harrowing film, impossible to "like" in any conventional way, hypnotically impossible to turn away from...
...much of the way, that's exactly what Jane Eyre, the new Broadway musical, delivers. Written and co-directed (along with Scott Schwartz) by John Caird, who collaborated with Trevor Nunn on the memorable stage adaptations of Nicholas Nickleby and Les Miserables, the show does a faithful and efficient job of translating Bronte's romantic classic to the stage. Jane, the plain but plucky orphan, travels from the home of an aunt who hates her to a strict religious school that tries to drum the spirit out of her, to a position as governess in a fine house whose master...
...burnished browns and greens, but he and Caird don't seem up to the story's more difficult physical challenges: a fire set in Rochester's bedroom in the middle of the night, or Jane's first encounter with Rochester, when he is thrown from a horse on his way home. If you can't find a way to stage a horse accident convincingly, you might as well have the fellow just walk in the front door...
...fact, some thriller fans may feel that Wilson drags out the suspense a tad longer than is strictly necessary. But more patient readers will find plenty to divert them along the way. Coelho, for example, is not simply a plot functionary but an interesting and sympathetic character in his own right, a widower still grieving for his wife, killed a year earlier in a car accident, and uneasily trying to raise a daughter about the same age as the murder victim. And Wilson's descriptions often achieve epigrammatic power. Here is Felsen visiting bombed-out Berlin near...