Word: caste
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Barker assembles a cast of Londoners, misfits all, for her novel. Lily, the girl born wihtout fully-formed organs: Sara, Lily's mother and a boar farmer: Luke, the former pornographic photographer who smells of fish; Ronny, missing his big toes. At the slippery heart of her tale are two adult brothers, Nathan and Jim (whose name is really Ronny--all will be explained later) and Nathan's quest for redemption at not forcing his brother to escape from their pedophilic father...
...deformed offspring, and certainly everyone in the novel seems hermetically sealed as protection against the lack of love. But as in Luke's last name, "Hamsun--like handsome but back to front," the aesthetics of beauty are reversed as we are engaged by the characters. Our judgmental instincts cast to one side, we become open. We love these freaks...
...fact, much of the movie, with its uninspired cinematography and the dullness of its supporting cast, reeks faintly of television. The intermittent high school scenes, little more than filler here, seem more like "Dawson's Creek" with 4-letter words than anything else, a situation not helped by casting Joshua Jackson (also known as Pacey) in the role of Smith's best friend. The horror scenes, too, are filmed in a style that seems little more than a lackluster imitation of "The X-Files." Those same scenes are given their undeniable force not by the perfunctory work of the technicians...
...into the "itty bitty tiny" parameters of moden English, parameters Heaney has broken through with consummate skill in much of his own poetry. His main means of combating this problem was to reject the use of the heraldic language so often used for Beowulf in translation, choosing instead to cast the poem in the pre-chivalric voice of relatives he remembers from childhood as "big-voiced scullions." Thus, in the end, Heaney comes back to the memories of his childhood that so fascinated him in his early works...
...premise behind The Compleat Works of Wllm Shakspr (abridged) is simple and stunning. A reduced cast, with reduced props, reduces the entire body of Shakespeare's work into a svelte two-hour fling whose high purpose is to reintroduce to Shakespearean Production the lost quality of side-splitting humor...