Word: causticity
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...Guys from Verona, by James Kaplan (Atlantic Monthly Press; 341 pages; $25), is also set at the millennium's turn, to no symbolic, ironic, metaphysical or literary effect whatsoever. Who cares? It's a caustic parody of platinum-card pretension in New Jersey's upper-middle-class 'burbs. Everyone drives I-got-mine-mobiles, lives in we-got-ours palazzos and connives ceaselessly to trade up for yet grander cars, real estate, spouses and even, Lord love a duck, tennis partners. Was it this way in 1974, when Will and Joel were big-shot seniors at Verona High School? They...
...some reporters openly criticized the (non-Tibetan) organizers of his trip to Australia because of their $20 T shirts and official sponsorship from Nike, Thai International Airlines and Ford. I must confess, though, that I know of this only because the Dalai Lama told me of it--and a caustic clipping about the "Dalai Lama Show," the only item up on the bulletin board of the Dolma Ling Nunnery in Dharamsala...
DIED. ROD MILBURN, 47, genial 1972 Olympic gold medalist who won the 110-m hurdles at Munich; from falling into a railcar full of caustic chemicals while on the job; in Baton Rouge...
...psychological damage can last a lifetime. An inquisitive child pulls at the handle of a pot on the stove and is scalded by a cascade of boiling water. A smoker falls asleep with a lighted cigarette and is badly burned when the bedding catches fire. An eruption of caustic chemicals engulfs a worker, eating away skin and flesh. A blast of superheated air burns a fire fighter's face and damages his lungs...
Though it doesn't quite match Ang Lee's wonderful gift for rendering social conventions hilarious, "Shall We Dance?" is bound to tickle the most staid viewer. It makes abundant, admittedly effective use of stock comic devices and characters. Eriko Watanabe cuts a droll figure as the experienced but caustic and somewhat unattractive dancer whom Sugiyama agrees to partner in an amateur competition; Naoto Takenaka hams it up as a painfully self-conscious colleague who dons a wig and hurls himself with fiendish gusto into the rhumba; Sugiyama's two fellow dance-pupils--one short and hyper...