Word: deadness
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...Portman) and their two bright young daughters and to fetch from prison his wastrel brother Tommy (Gyllenhaal), who is at the end of his sentence for assaulting a bank teller. Shortly after arriving in Afghanistan, Sam's plane is shot down and crashes; he and his men are believed dead, and Grace soon gets the awful news. In fact, he and another Marine have been captured by a Taliban group. They are tortured, forced to spill secrets and, at riflepoint, pushed into a life-or-death dilemma. Back home, Tommy has ingratiated himself into the Cahill home. The girls adore...
...story's literary antecedents are ancient and plentiful. You'll find them in the Old Testament (Cain and Abel), in medieval romance (Heloise and Abelard) and in 19th century poetry (Tennyson's "Enoch Arden"), not to mention dozens of movies about men whose wives think they're dead and marry someone else. All these motifs appear in the script that Anders Thomas Jensen wrote for Susanne Bier's 2004 Danish film Brodre, of which Brothers is a nearly scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, Americanization. Except for a few stunt exercises, like Gus Van Sant's Psycho and Michael...
...director who is sensitive to just about every nuance of character and situation. Tommy at first seems a malingering loser, blaming his situation on everyone but himself - his stern father (Sam Shepard) and even Sam, who loves him and sticks up for him - and when Sam is reported dead, Tommy typically thinks he's the center of the tragedy. But Gyllenhaal slowly works his way out of the viewer's suspicions; meanwhile, Portman shows us a devastated woman in need of a man to ease her solitude and warm her heart...
...police chief and other top cops for alleged narco-corruption - was fatally riddled with bullets by two hit men dressed in suits as he sipped coffee in a Starbucks. Last month, Jesús Zambada, the nephew of a top drug-cartel boss, Ismael (El Mayo) Zambada, was found dead in the federal safe house where he was being guarded. Officials say he hanged himself, but few in Mexico are buying that. (See pictures of Ciudad Juárez, the most dangerous city in the Americas...
...best news of all is the recent publication, as a Penguin Classic, of The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China. It's a work that has nothing to do with introducing an up-and-coming writer, but rather seeks to widen appreciation of the long-dead Lu Xun - the pen name of Zhou Shuren, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1936 at the age of 55. (Read "China's Troubled Coming-Out at Book Fair...