The purple rose of Cairo.WOODY ALLEN's latest, The Purple Rose of Cairo, could be called a minor effort if every Allen film weren't that. I mean that an idea or situation or problem is dealt with too casually and superficially, despite all the cleverness, to come alive. "Come alive" is the mot juste here, for Cecilia, a waitress in a New Jersey hash house and married to an unemployed bully (the time is 1935), finds solace only in movies such as the quasi-British, would-be-sophisticated Hollywood comedy about a gallant pith-helmeted explorer who is brought back alive to a Manhattan of white telephones, ermine ermine, name for a number of northern species of weasel having white coats in winter, and highly prized for their white fur. It most commonly refers to the white phase of Mustela erminea, called short-tailed weasel in North America and stoat in the Old World. furs, and little white lies, and entitled The Purple Rose of Cairo. As the enraptured en·rap·ture tr.v. en·rap·tured, en·rap·tur·ing, en·rap·tures To fill with rapture or delight. en·rap Cecilia watches the film for the fifth time, her fellow spectators in the shabby movie house and the characters on screen are equally dismayed to see the explorer step out of the movie, gather up Cecilia, and make off with her. She and he are equally smitten with each other; when, later, the actor who portrayed the explorer pops up to persuade his alter ego A doctrine used by the courts to ignore the corporate status of a group of stockholders, officers, and directors of a corporation in reference to their limited liability so that they may be held personally liable for their actions when they have acted fraudulently or unjustly or when to rejoin the movie-within-the-movie, the actor, too, falls in love with Cecilia. As others have pointed out, the best things about Purple Rose derive either from Buster Keaton's Shylock Shylock shrewd, avaricious moneylender. [Br. Lit.: Merchant of Venice] See : Usury Jr. or from Fellini's The White Sheik, both incomparably superior to Allen's confection con·fec·tion n. A sweetened medicinal compound. Also called electuary. . Neither the illusion-versus-reality theme nor the pathetic star-worshipper topos to·pos n. pl. to·poi A traditional theme or motif; a literary convention. [Greek, short for (koinos) topos, (common)place.] Noun 1. is treated with new insight or special sensitivity; as in Zelig, the chief attention goes to fanatically authentic period detail and technical hocus-pocus, especially in the shifts from the parodistic inner film in black-and-white to the outer film in 1935-ish color, a sentimental parable about movie-house daydreaming as the only palliatie for life's assorted ills. I say a purple rose is a purple rose is a purple rose, whether as film or as film-within-film, and, either way, it's spinach and to hell with it. As Cecilia, Mia Farrow gives a touching, sweet but not saccharine sac·cha·rine adj. Of, relating to, or characteristic of sugar or saccharin; sweet. performance, the like of which, however, has been seen before. |
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