Friday, June 1, 2012
May 28, 2012 Issue
The most interesting sentences in this week’s issue are by
Richard Brody. In his capsule review of Leos Carax’s Boy Meets Girl (1984), he
writes:
Lucid, sardonic, cinema-centric asides (especially one great
set piece involving an aged, hearing-impaired movie technician from the
silent-era) adorn their all-night tangle of intimacy, building to a grungy,
furiously self-deprecating Liebestod.
Notice how he deliciously delays the verb. His sentences are
like long freight trains, multi-colored boxcars of description strung before and aft of the
locomotive verb. I’m a sucker for such front-loaded constructions. Brody is a
master writer of them. Here’s another example, this one from his mini-review of
Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), also in this week’s New Yorker:
The irrepressible allure of Hitchcock’s visual extravagance
– his baroque swirl of caustic greens, voluptuous purples, acidic yellows, and
fiery reds, the indecent glare of daylight – conjures a vortex of unconscious
desires beyond the realm of dramatic machinations; his happy ending, of health
restored and crime punished, resembles an aridly monastic renunciation.
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