Word: boyds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That's the magic trick British Author William Boyd has managed in his fourth novel. He tells the life story of a rather prickly film director of genius, one John James Todd, and in doing so describes the making of Todd's silent masterpiece so clearly and vividly that the reader may feel he has seen the nonexistent epic. Titled The Confessions: Part I, it is the first film in a projected trilogy that is to be the realization of Todd's dreams. Imprisoned in Germany during World War I, he read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, and it took...
Todd's life is a walk through the 20th century, and Boyd makes a lavish, if somewhat raveled, tour leader. Todd's mother, like Rousseau's, dies giving birth to him, and he grows up with his dour physician father and his pompous elder brother, not knowing much of love except for the erratic attentions of Oonagh, the daily. An indifferent student, he is eventually shipped off to a boarding school that he actually enjoys, in part because he never takes rugby seriously and in part because he is able to develop his talent for photography...
These early scenes have a vigor and pictorial sharpness that mark Boyd's best writing. After reading the description of the Todds' house, the reader feels he could find his way around it in the dark. The chapter on the school is as effective in miniature as any number of public school classics. Todd's closest friend is an acne-ridden chap named Hamish who happens to be a mathematical wizard. Hamish is the goat of some brutish schoolboy pranks, but he is too intoxicated by his own theories to care very much. His presence gives rise to some authorial...
...their images like Day- Glo wallpaper after a food fight, you will feel right at home. Watching three of the segments (based on hit songs from Un Ballo in Maschera, La Forza del Destino and Rigoletto), purists could sneer at Aria as MTV -- Movies Trash Verdi. But Producer Don Boyd and his crew want to revive the old music's passion and fun, not to mock its petrified conventions. And as often as not, the film succeeds. This is high culture dolled up as pop culture, aesthetics for the anesthetized, opera for the inoperative...
...Gardner replaced Boyd and surrendered an RBI single to Dale Sveum. Another run scored on a wild pitch before Gardner put down the rally...