Having an older man step into the Doctor's shoes was supposed to eliminate the forced romantic tensions that dominated so many of Tennant/Smith's story lines.
Colin Firth, as Vermeer, must reconcile the domestic calm of the painter's family life with the life-force romantic-artist image that the director has evidently decided should be his look.
Pretty much every major staging of "Merchant" during the past 60 years has been ruled by "the Shylock problem," forcing the romantic comedy around him to seem both secondary and sour.
Tilbert has said that his brother "will openly declare that he writes the best prose since Kleist," but cinema serves Herzog better: it forces his Romantic sensibilities into a modern frame.
THOUGH you have to pass a metal detector to reach her grim cinder block headquarters, a former darkroom at the High School of Graphic Communication Arts on West 49th Street, Lt. Helen Rossi, the hard-talking matriarch of New York City's truancy task force, is a romantic at heart.
The idea of history as a force and the romantic concept of revolution were highly influential on transcendentalists like Emerson, and through them on American literature in general.
For the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, he represented the primal life-force; the German Romantic novelist ETA Hoffmann saw him as a reflection of "the eternal conflict of heavenly and demonic forces"; the French novelist Albert Camus described him as, "a man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply renunciation".
"Black Romantic" forces all this into the open, where it should be.
Ellen Winter's dexterous first collection of stories is mostly about women who are forced to confront romantic and domestic crises.
To hear Tony Bennett sing "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?" is to receive a lesson in how to strip a song to its bones and discover primal forces hiding below romantic sentiments.
"She was the romantic, creative force behind the whole endeavor," Hugh Davies said.
