Word: anguishingly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...changed his life: the night the Nazi soldiers came to his parents' house in their Polish village. Jakob, then seven, was still small enough to fit into the hiding place behind a wall, but his sister Bella, 15, was not. The aging poet remembers what happened next with understated anguish: "The burst door. Wood ripped from hinges, cracking like ice under the shouts. Noises never heard before, torn from my father's mouth. Then silence. My mother had been sewing a button on my shirt. She kept her buttons in a chipped saucer. I heard the rim of the saucer...
...long." And more. For as director Newell (himself making a quantum leap from the frothy Four Weddings and a Funeral) observes, Brasco "is a hard man, a brutal man," operating in a narrative that offers him no convenient escape clauses, no soft or fanciful evasions of fate. Forced in anguish to abandon his real family for his Mob family--his wife, whose patience with his absences finally runs out, is very well played by Anne Heche--Brasco must ultimately betray his only real friend in the criminal clan, Al Pacino's very weary, very unsuccessful and finally very touching soldier...
Ordinarily such trespasses against truth would be enough to condemn such a movie, but Rhames' gravity and grace, Voight's pinched anguish as he wills himself to do right, the moving work of actors like Don Cheadle and Esther Rolle do much to redeem this film for human if not historical reality. Rosewood finds, in a shameful bygone moment, sources of pride for contemporary audiences. There are worse things to do with the past...
...right to die" and "death with dignity" brigade do not occupy the moral high ground on this issue. And they are certainly not the only ones with compassion for those who suffer. All of us feel the pain and anguish of those we love who are terminally ill; like many others, I have personally experienced the anguish of a loved one experiencing a slow, painful death. But my response to such suffering differs fundamentally from those who would legalize euthanasia. As a society we should show compassion for those who suffer, not by saying "we can help...
...with upbeat rhythms, he produced music that took the listeners' minds off of their worries. The fanciful gems of "The Syncopated Clock" or "The Bugler's Holiday" were by no means meditative or emotionally taxing; these light and seemingly simple pieces aimed to induce laughter and dancing rather than anguish and contemplation...