Word: algren
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first awards ceremony took place at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City on March 16, 1950, co-sponsored by three other literary organizations in a coup of writers awarding other writers. Nelson Algren won in the fiction category for his tragic American hero story, The Man with the Golden Arm, William Carlos Williams in the poetry category for his work Paterson: Book III and Selected Poems, and Dr. Ralph Rusk in the nonfiction category for The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The New York Times noted the following day that "of the principal prize winners only one, Mr. Algren...
...Yorker. It was the Chicagoan. Playboy was founded at about the time the Second City was becoming the Third, after Los Angeles, in population and cultural import. But from the first, home-town boy Hef pursued Chicago writers and artists, perhaps because he could hustle them personally. Nelson Algren, Ben Hecht, Silverstein, LeRoy Neiman, and later David Mamet, gave Playboy a Midwestern voice to go with its middle-American notion of pulchritude...
...Captain Nathan Algren (Cruise) informs the audience in the first of many overly solemn voiceovers, the year is 1876. Algren is a broken man, tortured by nightmares about his participation in an attack on a neutral Cheyenne village during the American Civil War. Reduced to drunkenly demonstrating his riflery skills at carnivals along the West Coast, Algren reluctanctly accepts an offer to train a modernizing Japanese army during the sweeping changes of the Meiji Renaissance. Soon after arriving in Tokyo, Algren is captured in battle by the rebel Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), a fierce but predictably wise warrior committed to preserving...
...Algren may be in Japan, but he quickly develops a case of Stockholm Syndrome. Under the influence of his dignified captors, Algren learns Japanese, rediscovers his inner goodness, and, in the course of one arduous morning, overcomes his alcoholism. Twelve steps aren’t necessary in this Land of the Rising Sun: from the patronizing perspective of The Last Samurai, all an American expatriate needs is a kimono and a hearty bowl of rice to be spiritually cleansed and freed from Western corruption...
Inspired by his luscious, repressed female host—you could cut the sexual tension with an intricately engraved sword—Algren takes up arms against his former employers, the easily manipulated emperor and his evil American advisers. The only problem, from a narrative standpoint, is that the audience has no idea why it should oppose the Western-leaning Japanese ruler or root for the samurai, who are themselves highly militaristic and weaponry-obsessed. The only discernible difference between the two parties is the crude machine guns used by the modernizers and the bows and arrows of the traditionalists...