Kuroda has admitted that at the time he received Mashimo's invitation, he felt frustrated after his first project has been canceled by the publisher, so he decided to make Madlax "really extravagant", blending as many genres at once as he could.
Gerard (Kornelis van het) Reve, who made his debut as a deadpan chronicler of postwar malaise in De avonden (1947; "The Evenings"), concocted, in such books as Nader tot U (1966; "Nearer to Thee"), an extravagant and virtuoso blend of fact and fiction in the name of Romantic Decadence.
The loftiest poetic sentiments are blended with extravagant spectacle that rivals Cecil B. DeMille (an Italian court that somehow includes animatronic elephants) and Steven Spielberg (when Mephisto whisks Faust away on a night flight across Europe).
That dream is realised in one of several sequences that blend the characters' extravagant looks and mannerisms with vast and beautiful Australian landscapes, inferring, perhaps, that one is no more natural than the other.
Mikael Wood of Los Angeles Times believed the album presented a desire to push creative boundaries and particularly praised "how the music similarly blends the intimate and the extravagant".
Irreverent but considered, these scene-stealers — cigarette-slim and shown in extravagant brocades, cool jacquards and slippery jewel-tone silk blends — seem destined to be the life of the party.
Among the actors, special critical praise was reserved for the composer's brother, Fred Sullivan, in the role of the Learned Judge: "The greatest 'hit' was made by Mr. F. Sullivan, whose blending of official dignity, condescension, and, at the right moment, extravagant humour, made the character of the Judge stand out with all requisite prominence, and added much to the interest of the piece".
Bailey's interest in Green made good sense, given the two writers' similar blends of comic tone and melancholy subject matter and their sharp ear for the more extravagant rhetorical flourishes of British working-class speech.
