Word: witchingly
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NABOKOV hated many things--popular culture, for instance, including advertising, journalism, and psychology (Freud was the Viennese witch doctor). He hated Thomas Mann. And most interesting of all, he hated Dostoevsky. Nabokov is at his most provocative when he ranks the great Russians. Most of his own emotions, it seems, were poured into his worshipping of Tolstoy, on the one hand, and his vicious debunking of Dostoevsky, on the other. The final ranking is, officially: 1. Tolstoy; 2. Gogol; 3. Chekhov; 4. Turgenev. Dostoevsky is dead last. Nabokov accuses him of sloppy and melodramatic Christianity, reactionary slavophilism (which Nabokov links...
...heat of the blaze. Then as now, Harvard's erudition and concentrated intensity alone could not insure that the leaders she nurtured and inspired would do good work in the world. Harvard men figured prominently in the conversion of enthusiasm to immoral horror that was the Salem witch trials, and students now-shivering in the same wood-paneled common rooms, watching the same inhuman blustery gusts of a Cambridge winter--may not have that much trouble imagining why The Crucible rings true...
...crucial role of John Proctor, carries this approach vigorously to its full implications. Proctor, an upright but far from blameless Salem farmer, is tortured by the need to prove to himself and to his truly unstained wife Elizabeth that he is, in fact, a good man. As the witch trials become a raging mania in Salem, Proctor becomes inextricably involved, dragging all his past failings to light--including his liaison a year before with Abigail Williams, the girl accusing the Salem women of witchcraft--but can finally do nothing except die for his beliefs...
...Dame, British Actress Lesley-Anne Down, 27, bounces through enough personal crises to earn her a guest spot on Phil Donahue's show. During the two-hour special, to be aired next year, she is arrested, hauled off to the Bastille, kidnaped, ravished and accused of being a witch. In the gallows scene Lesley-Anne was forced to stand with a noose around her neck and her hands tied behind her back while she balanced atop a two-foot-high stool on a platform 15 feet above the ground. All this while Quasimodo, the hunchback bell ringer, played...
...film's major hangup is its confused characterization of evil. The devil (David Warner a la Ming the Merciless) tries to encompass all evil but fails to conjure anything but pity for his campy lines. Margaret Hamilton's witch in Oz terrified children of all ages; she never diluted her rottenness. Yet Gilliam has exorcised the seriousness out of where it belongs and makes the devil and his cohorts buffoons, wearing garbage bags over their capes and muttering things about advanced technology. Gilliam intends the plastic and electronics, which were also prominent in Kevin's living room, to personify evil...