Word: ackroyd
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...change me by throwing water at me--or money. But then TRADING PLACES (Harvard Science Center) might tell a different story. Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd reenact the old Prince and Pauper tale under the guise of a special experiment, the kind without flashing lights. Ackroyd, born with spoon in mouth and (as ever) no expression on face, plays the arrogant Rich Kid who loses it all so [the] thief sans trust fund ends up with his loot. The rich old Social Scientists who set both of them up want to settle the old Nature versus Nurture debate, where Nature...
...Upon a Time in America) Woods in a typically overheated ax murderer's job of acting. His nostrils perpetually flaring and his mannerisms obstinately childish even at "significant" moments (like the awful scene where his writer-pal dies), one thought sums Woods up: he gives great stereotypes. As Mr. Ackroyd would say: "The essence...
...year 1926 changed her prospects and her life. For one thing, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which caused a stir because it broke the rules of detective fiction: the narrator did it. Something more shocking followed. In December Agatha left her husband and child and disappeared for ten days, setting off a nationwide search and a carnival of speculation. Morgan's re-creation of this drama is meticulous, but it lacks, perhaps unavoidably, the tight resolution that Christie gave her invented plots...
Along with most commentators, Ackroyd agrees that Eliot's long, unhappy marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood crucially affected his life and career. Their union combined high-strung nerves and physical complaints that seem to have made sexual relations either impossible or undesirable; the sterility in The Waste Land may owe less to the decline of the West than to domestic problems of the Eliots. But Ackroyd suggests that in many ways Vivien was a good wife, supporting her husband in his dark moods and offering solicited judgments on his manuscripts. Eliot's method of divorcing her shimmers with...
...Eliot was horrified by the prospect of invasions of his privacy, he also longed for the popular acclaim that not even his most successful plays achieved. He was always at war with himself, and the disembodied voice of his best poetry emerged from the white center of this conflict. Ackroyd does a superb job of identifying and temporarily separating the diverse Eliots who struggled to make up the poet...