Word: dolle
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OCTOBER. Ken passes $3 million. Wins largest Daily Double bet in history ($44,000) by identifying Paul as the cute Beatle. Is invited to toss out the first ball of the World Series. Mattel launches a Smart Talking Ken doll that knows the answer to more than 1,500 questions. Ratings soar...
...book but a genre: confessional, and often sexually charged, works of fiction and nonfiction by young, neophyte women trying to capture the Zeitgeist of hard and fast living in a roller-coaster China. The latest to let it all hang out is teenage iconoclast Chun Sue's Beijing Doll. This semiautobiographical novel, first published in 2002 when Chun was just 17 and which was recently released in English, chronicles the turbulent life of Chun, a high school dropout who shares the same name as the author. For Chun, school is an annoyance that keeps her from more pressing concerns like...
...Reading Beijing Doll often makes you feel you're stuck on the phone with a mopey teenager who takes herself too seriously. The book is dense with melodramatic passages such as "I wanted to say that no one could plug the hole in my heart, that it was lost, that it was lonely." Chun's characters aspire to be individuals but can hardly be distinguished from one another, and the author offers scant insight into what drives them, other than their erratic mood swings...
...despite its flaws, Beijing Doll opens a window to the seemingly aimless lives of China's urban youth. Chun doesn't fight to defend her freedom by marching on Tiananmen Square; she does it by skipping school and dyeing her hair bright red. In China today, that's what passes for rebellion...
...Most messed-up of all is Heidi, Shortland's angel with dirty wings, whose eternal openness almost leads to her destruction. In the film's most daring scene, she brings home two city boys to her room where, drugged out, she is passed around like a rag doll. Both funny and unbearably sad, the scene developed from intensive rehearsals with National Institute of Dramatic Art graduates Toby Schmitz and Henry Nixon. "It was almost as if it was just her body in the scene and not her soul," Shortland recalls. With Cornish's out-there performance (the light to Worthington...