Word: aspidistra
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...else is buying. Obsessed with strictures of class (his is "lower upper middle"), he woos his muse while exasperating Rosemary (Helena Bonham Carter), the art director of his ads and the love of his miserable life. If this version of George Orwell's 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying is too sunny for its subject, it provides a field day for the lanky Grant. His Gordon is self-absorbed, fulminating--the angry young man 20 years before Jimmy Porter--and utterly charming...
Bonham Carter's career has not lingered exclusively in Edwardiana; curiosity drives her into many movie landscapes. She is splendid as the impatient girlfriend of penniless poet Richard E. Grant in a lovely new film of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. She has played Marina Oswald (the TV movie Fatal Deception), Woody Allen's selfish wife (in Mighty Aphrodite), Sister Clare to Mickey Rourke's Francis of Assisi (no, really, in the 1989 Francesco), a French-speaking fashion designer (Portraits Chinois), a bachelor-party stripper (the BBC's Dancing Queen) and a scrubwoman who lops off vital parts...
...Spokesman George S. Vest, "a supporting, catalytic adjunct" to the Geneva talks. But a Kissinger aide described the perils of personal diplomacy in words that were more germane: "The style and inclination of the man is to go and do it himself. But once you have sent the biggest aspidistra of them all, you are out of aspidistras...
...Links. Actually, the biggest aspidistra had been sent because the talks were bogging down. The men charged with plotting preliminary military disengagement at Geneva-Israeli General Mordechai Gur and General Taha El Magdoub of Egypt-had done well enough with the "technical models" that they proposed for separating forces in Sinai. The difficulty was that on both sides, the proposed military moves were inextricably connected to political decisions that neither general could make.Thus, after two meetings last week, totaling 3½ hours at Geneva's Palais des Nations, the military talks adjourned and discussions shifted home...
...usually busy talking to a pet moose or rocketing off to the moon. But at least, the cautionary yarns of the brush-your-teeth-or-mommy-won't-love-you variety seem to be on the wane. So are humorless educative nip-ups of the A-is-for-aspidistra, B-is-for-bathy-sphere order...