Word: badness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...neurotically generous. She is neurotically needy. We all know about people like Betty Blue: in movies, though not necessarily in life, they come to a bad end. Indeed, much of the suspense in this high-fevered melodrama revolves around whether that end will arrive sooner or later, and just how painful it will...
Lyubimov was inspired to stage his original Moscow version, he says, by reading the essays of schoolchildren, an extract from one of which provides the coda to the show: "So, Raskolnikov was right to murder the old woman. Too bad he got caught." In Lyubimov's view, the child was echoing the amoral views of a teacher and, in turn, the state. An attentive father who travels everywhere accompanied by his second wife Katya, a Hungarian, and son Piotr, 7, Lyubimov will next mount an adaptation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard...
Some of the deals went bad. One of his first failures was a planned $600 million tourist resort that was shot down by the Egyptian legislature because of concern about damage to the nearby pyramids. Sudan's President Numeiry invited Khashoggi to become a virtual economic czar in his country. He set up a joint venture with the government to exploit oil resources. When Numeiry was deposed in a coup in April 1985, the new government accused Khashoggi of having interfered in the country's political and economic affairs. He is now unwelcome there...
...Parisian dramatist Jean Cocteau once characterized his fellow Frenchmen as a bunch of Italians in a bad mood. As thumbnail assessments go, that may have been incomplete, but it was not too far off the mark. France last week continued to be seized by a wave of train and other public-service strikes that have disrupted the country for a month. Not only was the typical Frenchman's mood even sourer than usual, but there were numerous signs that French political life, and daily life for that matter, was Italianizing at the edges. The successive crises that have beset...
...about that happily-ever-after marriage? Maybe it lasted only a few years before plummeting into an acrimonious separation in 1963 that left Roth deep in debt, thanks to legal expenses, and sent him reeling into five years of psychoanalysis. Awful, but for the sake of the narrative not bad. Right about here a reversal of fortune would do nicely. So our hero wrote Portnoy's Complaint (1969), the novel that made him rich, famous and controversial. Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy were snapped up by Hollywood. And then . . . and then Roth fell in love with a movie star...