Sentences with phrase «salinger picaresque»

It is hard to say just what Moby - Dick, Melville's greatest and most famous work, really is: a metaphysical Romantic tragedy about Captain Ahab's sexual obsession with an enormous white whale; an immense picaresque comedy about sailing; or a serio - comic grand opera that begins with the narrating Ishmael bored by the streaming crowds of New York and ends with him alone in the ocean, floating on the harpooner Queequeg's coffin.

Not that such an answer is wholly false: Certainly the more picaresque side of Juan's adventures — the veil of night, the cloaked figure stealing over balconies and through windows, the sordid incognito — seems only quaint in light of today's morbidly austere and functionalist venereal aesthetics.

The quest is distinguished from mere adventure, a trait which marks a great deal of nonfantasy fiction (going back, perhaps, to the picaresque novel).

When the students at Berkeley struck back by folding their IBM cards, they were making a picaresque counter-attack on the language system that ultimately determines the meaning of language.

Nelson, a picaresque character like De Portago, had ridden with the Spaniard before — a victorious ride in last year's Tour de France for automobiles.

Nevertheless, this is a superbly written, witty and sometimes picturesque - even picaresque - journey though the modern world.

Caught in a Mirror is another picaresque book.

A smarter Salinger picaresque might have kept the figure at a distance to reflect the public relationship to the man.

A voyage that begins in the dark fogs of Auschwitz, and continues through the black markets of Cracow, through the resettlement camps of Katowice, following the movement of Red Army convoys sometimes random, nomadic, through a devastated Russia which is at once both tragic and comic, both epic and picaresque.

The Coens, masters of the picaresque, have a tendency to wax episodic — spending too much time on individual set pieces rather than a cohesive whole — and while this movie is far more tightly structured than The Big Lebowski, it does not quite reach the brilliantly plotted heights of either Barton Fink or Fargo.

With Man Down, following the jarring, harshly lit opening sequence, Montiel plays with three time periods, the first being the picaresque, Apple - pie glow afforded white, suburban middle class folks who follow each other through familiar life trajectories.

Thus the Coens» film: nominally a movie about the travails of a trio of chain - gang escapees making their way across Depression - era Mississippi; in fact, a picaresque musical romp and arguably their lightest cinematic fare to date.

Virgil's journeys have a picaresque quality, which can make the film feel overly precious — look, here's the drunkard figuring himself out, stumbling from one microcosm of the struggles of his people to another.

Take Catch Me If You Can (2002), a propulsive, fact - based picaresque about the youthful con man Frank Abagnale Jr., who scammed his way across America in the early 1960s by adopting a series of ersatz personas.

A picaresque tale for the 1970s with strong political leanings, it's also a satire, a set of Brechtian parables, a rock film, an ironic pilgrim's progress, etc., etc..

Maclean makes Fuckhead a picaresque figure for the doped - up, dropped - out»70s, a character who retains audience sympathies despite a series of disturbing and destructive scenarios.

It's an effortless balance of romance and adventure against a picaresque landscape populated by eccentrics and social register smoothies, none of whom what they appear to be.

It's a picaresque New York indie about a socially inept, emotionally damaged, stuttering motormouth named Keith Sontag (an insanely ambitious, almost fully - realized performance by first - time actor Dore Mann).

His first film as writer - director was 1990's «Joe Versus the Volcano,» starring Tom Hanks as an ex-firefighter who goes on a picaresque journey after a scary medical diagnosis, and Meg Ryan as three different women he meets along the way.

Thus begins the running joke of ex-theatre wunderkind Martin McDonagh's clever, savvy and enjoyable revamp of the odd - couple / gangster caper, a genre picture confident its own audience - pleasing verbal sparrings, joke - enabling moral sophistry and tongue - in - cheek classical and cinematic borrowings — from Hieronymus Bosch's «Last Judgement» to Nic Roeg's «Don't Look Now» and every belfry, picaresque canal and famous seventeenth - century building in the «Venice of the North».

Like that film, The Lucky Ones is structured as a picaresque.

From its first sequence, the film uses the horror genre's picaresque potential to explore the severe ups and downs of Sao Paolo: Clara, an African - Brazilian would - be nurse, interviews to nanny for a rich white woman who turns out to be a single mother - to - be, Ana.

American Made is a swaggering picaresque thriller with enough surface - level fun that livens its untamed abandon and succinct details.

(1973) was Anderson's most ambitious production, a picaresque epic about the futility of ambition.

As Winfried's antics continue, Toni Erdmann takes a serendipitous path toward the picaresque, and the disjointed humour.

But this LFF screening means you have no excuse to miss this grotesque picaresque about parental responsibility which features perhaps the funniest assisted death sequence ever laid down on film.

Shot rapidly and affording all the more vitality and improvisational fireworks for it, Wong Kar - wai's picaresque laudation to the most alluring heavy hearts in Hong Kong is nostalgic, rollicking, and constantly breaks new ground.

Like its festival sibling Lovelace, Winterbottom's well - crafted film evolves from picaresque to tragedy — though in this case, perhaps owing to its gender perspective, it makes a stronger impression in the former mode than the latter.

In his classic 1926 novel, Moravagine, Cendrars draws on the picaresque form to send his titular hero — a crippled brute given to raping and murdering women — and his psychiatrist, the ironically titled Raymond Science (the book's narrator) on a world tour in the years leading up to the Great War, taking them from Europe to America and back in a darkly comedic odyssey of destruction and non-enlightenment.

At that point, the film becomes more picaresque as Charley trots around the country, looking for his aunt to take him in.

Director Richard J. Lewis» picaresque portrait of TV producer Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti), a blunt, irascible grouch, is a delight, a seemingly freewheeling journey through Barney's memories of a life that took in two disastrous marriages before he met the love of his life, elegant radio presenter Miriam (Rosamund Pike).

Their picaresque journey, punctuated by campside evenings spent looking through slides of their past life, is going only one way - but these are outstanding performances, embracing age, by Sutherland and Mirren (despite a dodgy accent).

Sometime after Porky's and before American Pie, novelist C.D. Payne rehabilitated the horny teen boy genre with Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp, a 500 - page picaresque told by a sex - obsessed fourteen - year - old (pardon the redundancy).

Here, in this heartfelt sphere of empathic understanding and picaresque perception we see a childhood, a motherhood, and an America that's both exhilarative and deeply profound.

This black and white picaresque depicts a rebellious young boy allowed to live with his older brother in 1999 Mexico City, during student unrest.

And, of course, the pulpy, melodramatic plot of The Postman Always Rings Twice is the structuring device of Ossessione, in contrast with the episodic, picaresque plotting of the films we think of as neorealist.

Who, what, when: In America's bicentennial year of 1976, somehow a 47 - year - old Italian art - house auteur with a penchant for flashy white - rimmed eyeglasses and on - screen gender clashes involving sex and politics, was lauded for her World War II concentration - camp picaresque «Seven Beauties.»

And tell it she does, in the picaresque confessional vein of Moll Flanders, through a series of episodes that chart her youth with her naturalist father (Christian Slater, whose transatlantic accent has somehow depreciated from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), her early teen years as a budding sex addict (portrayed in flashback by Stacy Martin), her tumultuous on / off affair with her oily boss, Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), and her later career as a torture artist in the employ of the mysterious L (Willem Dafoe).

That film, based loosely on the novel by Irvine Welsh, was a giddily stylish picaresque about a group of twentysomething friends scoring heroin at every opportunity in Edinburgh.

There is also something of an inverted picaresque style to the story, following these characters on their travels.

Official Premise: Adapted from the picaresque novel by Barry Gifford, writer - director David Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990) is a scarifying road movie starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as Sailor and Lula, a pair of star - crossed lovers pursued across the American landscape by all manner of horrors.

John Kennedy Toole's hilariously picaresque novel about the implacable Ignatius J. Reilly: a «huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter - day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter» and his adventures in New Orleans.

Tyrnauer's camera follows him over several months as he meets up with old colleagues — some of them from his L.A. Confidential-esque gas stations days — who corroborate his picaresque tales.

This picaresque debut also stars a widower who feels at loose ends after his wife's death, although Arthur Pepper is decidedly more positive - thinking than Ove.

Bray's success comes on the heels of winning the Printz Medal for Going Bovine, a picaresque tale of a teenage boy searching for a cure for mad cow disease, but she is also known for her atmospheric Victorian - era series that started with A Great and Terrible Beauty and contains supernatural elements.

One of the first titles that came to mind for me was Stephen Palmer's Hairy London, a quite extraordinary picaresque romp across an Edwardian London transformed by an overnight growth of... hair.

Abrim with picaresque adventures — escapades that carry Jennet from King William's Britain to the fledgling American Colonies to an uncharted Caribbean island — our heroine's search for justice entangles her variously in the machinations of the Salem Witch Court, the customs of her Algonquin Indian captors, the designs of a West Indies pirate band, and the bedsheets of her brilliant lover, the young Ben Franklin.

Part picaresque, part bildungsroman, Lady Bird & The Fox is a return to the dual - narrative romantic adventure of my early novels — packed with the kinds of historical detail that are generally overlooked in Australian fiction, and told with a bit of a wry smile and plenty of warmth.

The Art of the Wasted Day is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude.

«Lusty, violent, wildly funny... The Ginger Man is the picaresque novel to stop them all.»