Word: despairful
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Indonesia would be an easy diagnosis for a psychiatrist: manic-depressive. In the 18 months since former President Suharto was deposed, the country has lurched repeatedly from giddy euphoria to violent despair and back. But despite the ethnic violence, lynchings and looting in major cities and the carnage in seceding East Timor, this sprawling archipelago of 210 million people has not disintegrated into ungovernability or civil war. Some had predicted the world's next Yugoslavia, but after last week, Indonesia had instead completed its graduation from a military-backed dictatorship to the world's third largest democracy (after India...
...finding the strength to write from the voices of three African-American writers, ultimately achieves that dream with the publication of Angela's Ashes. But the undercurrents of anger and resentment that reverberate through the book show us the raw underbelly of that dream: the humiliation, the loneliness, the despair and the jealousy. McCourt's second novel does not exist as an extension of his first book, devoid of any meaning. Rather, it shows us that the American dream--romantic though it may be--is still very much what his brother Alphie calls a "tormenting dream...
...into thinking this will be the routine buddy-cop movie with jolly, fat guy exchanging caustic one-liners with his thinner, but emotionally more substantive, partner. However, as the wheels spin out, the film takes the audience along for a more complex, hellish ride that visits death, madness, and despair on every street corner. Ving Rhames as Marcus brightens the movie with a comic volubility that the heavy film so badly needs. He is a smooth talking paramedic who has a soft spot for gin and prostitutes and a talent for preaching. Then watch as he, cradling the receiver, slips...
...Centered in this movie-world is Frank Pierce. Set in the early '90s, the film covers three nights in Manhattan in its heyday of urban despair. The whole world's an ambulance, it seems, and all the people in it merely victims. This movie pulls, emotionally as well as aesthetically. Sounds and colors of the sirens and streetlights are stretched out to a wail and a blur, and anguish tugs on every line of Cage's face. Many key scenes are cramped into the driver's seat and bloody siren lights stain the medics' faces. This gristly and sometimes hallucinatory...
...after being wooed by a combination of Nancy Reagan and Cabernet leftover from the Nixon administration, Edmund Morris agreed to become Ronald Reagan's authorized biographer. What Morris found, or, rather, didn't find, left him in such a state of despair that he went underground for years--quitting drink, staying home weekends and leaving his talents as a virtuoso pianist untapped. Morris spent his time reading the president's private diaries, watching old films and tracking down everyone from Reagan's high school flames to Colin Powell, only to discover that the President had a total lack of interest...